The Pirate Party ISP is born

IN A TWIST on the old adage "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em", the Swedish Pirate Party has founded an ISP of its own and started to offer some serious services for low prices.

The Pirate Bay had recently fought off the copyright cartels and their octopus-like tentacles wrapped around Swedish courts to barely escape closure thanks to the intervention of its political counterpart, the Pirate Party.

Now the youngest political party in Sweden has provided the filesharing outfit with a different weapon to fight off the brief-wielding lawyers.

The Pirate Party has created an ISP, dubbed PirateISP, based in the southern city of Lund, a place known for its 42,000-strong academic community, and will provide high quality Internet connections to the anonymity-seeking masses.

This makes sense of course. PirateISP's mission is based on the Pirate Party manifesto and customers taking up the service are showered with guarantees of anonymity and filesharing goodness.

Cities with academic communities have a younger population with a more forward-thinking take on things and their citizens are more likely to be the first to shed the triple-play manacles in favour of a full-blown IP-based lifestyle.

Initial plans involve taking about 5 per cent of the city's Internet clientele and only then spreading out to other Swedish cities.

Although still in what PirateISP calls 'beta' stage, the company is already offering fibre connections of 1Gb/sec for about £47. That's synchronous 1Gb/sec, by the way, not a massively misleading downlink speed with a stunted uplink speed.

As a reference, Telia, the incumbent triple-play provider is offering 1Gb/sec downlink with 100Mb/sec uplink fibre access for a 999 kroner, almost twice as costly as PirateISP. µ