All aboard the Trojan Horse (11 November 1999) BT will be offering wholesale services to Internet Service Providers next month which, in its own words, are intended to make possible arrangements which might include unlimited dialup calls to the Internet for a single monthly fee. BT has provided financial details in its press release - for almost the first time - but we need little detail to realise that the services it will offer are hopelessly inadequate. That's because ISPs still have to try to hide underlying metered charges. After eight hours per day at a flat rate per dialup box at the ISP end, not per ISP subscriber, BT starts to charge the ISP by the minute for access to the new services. Each dialup box supports fourteen users by BT's assumption and usually fewer than that in reality. Because of the variation between ISPs in the number of users per box, commonly known as the modem ratio, it's difficult to calculate exact figures, but even BT has admitted that the new services are barely better than existing ones. We discussed 'where now BT?' at Monday's Committee meeting. We concluded that BT would, at the moment, not dare bring in unmetered access itself because it would be seen to cave in to pressure. Instead, it could seek a Trojan horse, such as an ISP partner or partners, to implement unmetered access. What a premonition that turned out to be! It was almost a given that anything BT could come up with in the short term would be an inadequate compromise at best; surely BT is also trying to deflect attacks on it onto ISPs? It has mentioned the U-word and stated that it's up to ISPs to use what they're given - no matter its lack of fitness for purpose.