Onwards and upwards (13 January 2000) Behind the scenes, over Christmas and New Year, there has been tremendous activity involving BT Surftime. At the Fourth OFTEL Internet Forum, after presentations from BT and OFTEL, there was a barrage of questions which BT could not answer as the detail of Surftime simply had not been thought through by then. How everyone else could hook into the BT service was a particular problem; what was known at the time suggested that Internet Service Providers and bandwidth providers would be at the mercy of BT unless changes were made. In fact, it turned out that even basic information such as how phone numbers map to tariffs and what appears on bills was not known. So everyone has gone away and worked on solutions. We know that interconnect must be solved by the end of this week - yet Surftime will go ahead anyway in March or April, presumably with only BT Internet offering it, if agreement cannot be reached. We are sure pressure is being applied from above to BT and OFTEL given the seemingly non-negotiable deadline, the obvious cracks and the mad dash to fill them in. As you might expect, parties to the negotiations are having trouble seeing further than the short term and their own interests. What BT is doing is how bandwidth will be provided from now on; it is entirely different from what went before and, in many ways, provides a blank slate. Yet sending and receiving payment by the minute has proved so profitable so easily in the past it is proving hard to throw away the twentieth century.