For the last two years or so, some small ISP's, namely Camline, Vanilla and BellNet and some others used a service from Datastream branded as "Lavender" to offer ADSL to their customers. This was (is) a system where an ISP doesn't need to have any servers or a fast Internet connection or anything. All these were being offered by Datastream. All the ISP would have to offer was a mail server if email service was required. These ISP's would then sell Internet access to their customers, appearing as if they were offering the service, when in fact, the users were connecting to Datastream's infrastructure. I'm not saying there was anything wrong there - the users were happy... at least some of them were, the ISP's were happy because they were earning money without investing anything at all, and everything worked mostly as it should have.

Although this system decreased drastically in popularity because of some moves taken by Datastream such as the introduction of a 12GB monthly download limit, it is still being used today, but those who are still using it will soon have to stop. Today, David Thake, the Chairman of Vanilla Telecoms, which is the only ISP we know of that is still using this system, sent an email to Vanilla's subscribers saying that the Lavender service will no longer be offered starting from 1st August. Instead of Lavender, Vanilla is now offering two new moderately priced services - ADSL Lite and ADSL Gaming.

Meanwhile, Camline closed its doors down a few weeks ago and transferred its users to Maltanet. We didn't write any article on that because the guys at Camline were unwilling to give us any information why this was happening, and we didn't want to base our article on gossip. Up till today, we didn't know anything about what BellNet were going to do about this whole thing, so I visited their site and found out some highly exciting offers. They're offering an "economy" residential service for Lm29.75 a month for a 4092/256 connection, and for those who feel like their IP packets shouldn't pass through with the packets of the masses, there's a "1st Class" service priced at a whooping Lm46 monthly! Right on!