Terminology 2 (16 September 2000) Over time our use of 'unmetered' over 'free' has been taken up by the media and is now part of the language; in fact, we have even been asked to provide a corpus of 'unmetered' for the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Unfortunately, the advertising industry was less explicit, many people have complained about being misled, and the Advertising Standards Authority has recently made a number of rulings that Internet Service Providers must no longer use the word 'free' unless the service being provided actually costs nothing. ASA rulings have teeth: our first complaint, which was upheld (within ASA 1998 archive), forced Cable and Wireless Communications to insert awkward explanations into advertising. Taking 'unmetered' over 'free' further, for some time we have been using a simple scheme to describe how an Internet Service Provider charges for a service. The scheme is not ours - we believe it was originally devised by the FT - but this is the first time it has been written down explicitly. The picture is almost self-explanatory: So, for example: 24-7 Freecall offers a subscription unmetered service; Direct Connection offers a subscription metered service; virgin.net offers a subscription-free metered services; there are currently no subscription-free unmetered services in this country, although there are some in the USA. Note that any of these ISPs may offer other types of service, either now or in the future. Many have said that this scheme is 'too logical' or 'too straightforward'; however, we offer it without prejudice.