@the_leander
It's the same everywhere. Tiscali do it with their broadband service. Of course, all this does is make the connection and log you in, plus forcing the Tiscali page to come up on every connection.
You are quite free to connect without the dialler too, but they refuse to offer "support" in any such cases. I guess the same goes for NTL, but they don't want to advertise it that way.