The recent announcement of the collapse of Breathe.com, the UK's fourth largest Internet service provider (ISP) was due to a huge subsidy that they had to pay to BT, analysts stated earlier this week.

Breathe admitted that they could no longer continue their unmetered internet access service and pulled the plug, at the same time refusing to reimburse angry subscribers who had paid a £50 joining fee.

They were having to subsidise the service and pay BT on a metered basis, thus helping the company to run up debts of £50 million. This makes the future of unmetered access uncertain, certainly not a viable option for smaller ISP's such as breathe. To survive in the ISP market, you either have to be a telco or closely affiliated with one, thus leaving it in the hands of the bigger players.

Many ISP's are having to rethink their strategy, such as AOL, there is much speculation as to what organisations like this are going to do in the future and how they will survive.