Telewest breaks the mould (13 February 2000) From tomorrow four and a half million households with Telewest as their cable provider can sign up to SurfUnlimited. It gives them unmetered Internet access by telephone modem 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The only constraint is a cutoff after 30 minutes of the connection being inactive. There has been some confusion over what SurfUnlimited actually costs. You pay £9pcm for line rental, £10pcm for unmetered Internet access and are expected to spend £10pcm on metered voice calls, all including VAT. If you don't spend £10pcm on metered voice calls the difference between what you did spend and £10 is added to your next bill. Of course, you would pay the line rental plus - almost certainly - some or all of the £10 on metered calls anyway if you weren't using SurfUnlimited, so the maximum effective cost of SurfUnlimited is £20pcm including VAT. SurfUnlimited is the result of hard work by Telewest, its Internet Service Provider Cable Internet and its partner MSN UK, and we congratulate them on their efforts. Particularly pleasing, and unusual for the telecommunications industry in this country, is that Telewest said what they were going to do then, without fuss, went ahead and did it. We hope that SurfUnlimited will be a benchmark for the industry. Certainly, from information we have received, others appear to have realised that simply talking about doing things is not good enough, and that building up the number of subscribers to their Internet Service Provider with a cheap and cheerful offer is an efficient way to sell better services as they become available.