Calling all German citizens and schools (12 February 2000) Deutsche Telekom has announced unmetered Internet access in Germany via its Internet Service Provider T-Online thus: ISDN: DM100pcm for unmetered access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week or pay another 5DM on top of existing metered charges for unmetered access 24 hours on Sundays. ISDN D-channel: DM10pcm for 24/7 unmetered access. (The D-channel, at a fraction of the speed of the normal B-channel, is not used by German home users at the moment, but Deutsche Telekom is promoting it for stock quotes, small quantities of email and remote monitoring). DSL over ISDN: for the first 100,000 users to apply, 50 hours unmetered ISDN per month in addition to the existing service which starts at DM100pcm. 40,000 German schools to be given ISDN access with no online costs whatsoever - ISDN supplied free and not even a monthly charge - together with a homepage and up to 10,000 email addresses per school. All German students to be offered unmetered access, by ISDN, between 2pm and 6pm every weekday for DM1 per day. (At the time of writing DM1 = 32p = 51c = €0.51). The obvious catch, apart from the lack of timescales and rollout details, is that these offers appear to be BT Surftime revisited. What is being trailed appears to involve only Deutsche Telekom and T-Online: there is no mention of interconnect with other German telecommunications operators or Internet service providers. And, indeed, there are already rumblings from AOL Europe which, by an unfortunate coincidence, called for unmetered access the day before the Deutsche Telekom announcement. In translation: AOL Europe previously asked Deutsche Telekom to allow different providers to access an inexpensive flat rate connection. AOL Europe assumes that the tariff models announced by Deutsche Telekom will apply not only to customers of T-Online but also to all other Internet Service Providers in Germany. That said, another country bites the dust (with Japan slowly joining the 'unmetered club' as well) and 4 and 5 put the protracted huffings and puffings of BT and OFTEL over schools access into perspective.