France announces unmetered Internet access (3 February 1999) Today it's been announced that France Telecom will soon be offering flat-rate Internet access. The deal appears not to be as generous as the German offer, but it's a big step forward. Details will be finalised in a meeting between FT and the French regulator in mid-February, but the notion is that people will have an amount of call time (between 10 and 40 hours, depending on who you speak to) included with their line rental and then be able to purchase 'blocks of hours' in advance. There was absolutely no warning of this. As with Eire, a state-owned telecommunications provider has taken the lead: it seems that several Internet strikes over the past few months in France were noticed, and a general feeling was building up that France was behind other countries in Internet access because Minitel was proving too long-lived. In Europe, there is already - or soon will be - unmetered Internet access in Germany, France and Eire; unmetered access has been saved in Pakistan and the Philippines; unmetered access has always been enjoyed in every major English-speaking nation except the United Kingdom. OFTEL has often used 'cultural differences' between us and other countries as an explanation for metering; given the events of the past few months, 'market failure' would be a better explanation.