No school is an island (1 December 1999) We've issued our response to an OFTEL consultation paper, Connecting public institutions - BT's Public Institutions Internet Caller Service. This is the last in our series of responses ... for the moment. BT has proposed various unmetered telephone modem and ISDN access plans, due to start in April 2000, for schools, further education institutes, Citizens' Advice Bureaux and libraries, and OFTEL has called for responses. There are two main problems with what BT proposes. First is that the plans are too expensive. They look impressive ... until you find out that Kingston Communications, under the same regulatory constraints as BT, offer similar plans at considerably less than the BT proposed rates. In fact, we've been contacted by someone in the cable industry who stated that his former company (now taken over) was offering similar services in 1996 at a quarter or less of the BT proposed rates. We suspect that OFTEL's insistence on any BT rate demonstrably making a profit - of ill-defined magnitude - may have something to do with such distortions. Second is that there is no universal unmetered tariff from BT. Such a tariff is what we have always campaigned for: the consultation paper doesn't even touch on a swathe of relevant issues which such a tariff would resolve. In fact, it would have made the whole convoluted process of devising special access plans then asking for opinions on them unnecessary; organisations would simply sign up to the unmetered tariff like anyone else. The example we used is teachers preparing lessons from home, possibly with computers given to them as proposed in the last Budget. How are they going to afford extensive Internet access given that they are generally not well paid? And what about their students? Then there is another circle to be squared. Broadband access, on which BT makes proposals later, is the ultimate solution - for example, streaming audio and video, which has obvious untapped educational potential, demands a permanent fast connection to work properly - yet schools and institutions (and the general public) in remote areas will lag behind, at best, in getting broadband access although they probably need it most. We suggest that OFTEL and others really must start a debate on 'how do we include remote areas in the broadband revolution?'. It would expose a serious problem which we are not aware of anyone really tackling.