Stealing AltaVista's thunder (16 May 2000) LibertySurf, a consortium including Kingfisher (marketing), The X-Stream Network (Internet Service Provision) and Level 3 Communications (telecommunications) has announced an offer which gives anyone with a BT line unmetered Internet access for £20 a year. This has rather stolen the thunder of AltaVista, which announced a similar offer a few months ago but has yet to release it. How can such a spectacular offer be done? The main reason is that Level 3 Communications has been spending £10bn on building a network from scratch solely using IP (Internet Protocol). IP is the way of the future, being much more flexible and capable than PSTN (telephony protocols), which all previous unmetered offers have used. BT SurfTime, of which much more later, will exploit BT's new IP networks in a similar way. The LibertySurf offer is controlled by two means: » Making you travel to pick up a CD - there is no online signup and only Comet or MVC stock the CD. » Providing a PIN number with each CD so that it can only be used once. You pay £20 at the till for unmetered offpeak access for a year then, once you are online, you have the option of upgrading to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week unmetered access for a further £15 per year. We have a CD - we got it without any difficulty on the day after the offer was announced - and will be carefully monitoring the connection quality as more and more users come online.