'Scam'? Rather, 'start' (24 February 1999) John McCormac has passed on, before it is announced, the details of what Telecom Eireann are proposing (subject to regulatory approval) to give unmetered Internet access to users; there is also an Irish Times article. The deal is that users can buy 100 hours of access for £25-£30IRL; the final price is not yet fixed. As the time of writing we don't know what time periods (daytime, evening, weekend or any combination of those) or whether or not more than one 'block' of 100 hours can be purchased in advance. The announcement was trailed a long time ago and has been delayed two months; one can only imagine what sort of battles took place behind the scenes. Overthrowing fixed mental models is never easy. John describes the terms as a 'scam', but we prefer to call them a 'start'. Going to unmetered access aux États-Unis (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) in one go would have been too much to swallow. What matters is that metering has been stretched from one minute to 6,000 minutes at least, and increasing anything by three orders of magnitude at a stroke doesn't happen often. Very importantly, the Irish have realised that tiny increments of unmetered access are useless; we often see questionnaires in this country which suggest that more than eight or ten hours of Internet use a month is considered a great deal. 100 hours may fall far short of a whole working month, but that amount can only grow.