Telewest is next (14 December 1999) We've had very little contact with cable companies - they seem to have been keeping their heads down as BT formed an air-raid shelter - so an announcement on Monday by Telewest was a great surprise even although we heard a rumour the day before. So Telewest subscribers from London to Perth will have a happy Millennium and an even better St Valentine's Day! We give the offer 8 out of 10, rather than full marks, because of a couple of small deficiencies: What about people who physically cannot make landline calls? We would like to see a second tariff of £20pcm without the string attached; It would be worthwhile Telewest roping in other Internet Service Providers within its franchise areas to help spread the load. We wait to see what the other major cable companies, CWC and NTL, do; it seems that doing nothing is no longer an option. We've bored everyone to tears with our accounts of the Videotron tariff and our boundless love for it. Yet both BT and Telewest have realised, under tremendous pressure from all sides and about five years too late, that keeping traffic on your own network and moving Points of Presence closer to subscribers is a relatively simple way to provide unmetered telephony ... not just Internet access. More and more it seems that the introduction of NTS in 1996 (national calls across networks to Internet Service Providers) and its consequences - the removal of existing unmetered tariffs, the rise of subscription-free ISPs and various attempts to provide unmetered Internet access by the back door - was a catastrophic mistake. Where would we be now if what was being done years ago had been left alone?