'The Flat-Rate Fallacy' debunked (7 June 2001) Having won the argument for unmetered telecommunications in the United Kingdom we are well aware that the big telco metered mentality still persists in many countries around the world. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom's ISP subsidiary T-Online made a U-turn earlier this year on dial-up access by withdrawing its unmetered plan. Deutsche Telekom, indirectly, is going a step further than this by promoting the concept that 'metered is best'. An article entitled The Flat-Rate Fallacy appeared in the 14 May 2001 edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe. It was written by two employees of the German consulting firm that conducted the research on Internet usage which led T-Online to abandon unmetered pricing. As soon as we saw The Flat-Rate Fallacy we knew we could not let its erroneous assertions go unchallenged. We promptly wrote a Letter to the Editor debunking the article as, independently, did AOL Europe. Both letters were published on 22 May 2001. The following copyrighted article and letters are reproduced by the kind permission of The Wall Street Journal Europe; we thank AOL UK and Andrew Odlyzko for their help too. We have converted the newspaper text to Adobe Acrobat format; each file is approximately 10KB in size. The Flat-Rate Fallacy CUT Letter to the Editor AOL Europe Letter to the Editor