There's plenty of room at the bottom (28 February 1999) Paul Stephens has written an well-argued article about CUT in PC Plus. He's in favour of what we are doing but has one problem: Normally I'd be solidly in favour of such a campaign, but in this case I have a reservation. The problem is that, while unmetered calls would be a nice short-term money-saver, they'd also be a distraction from the long-term objective of getting rid of low-capacity dial-up telephone lines altogether, and replacing them with something that can bring a proper Information Superhighway into our homes and workplaces. I think we're pretty clear about this in our Mission Statement and the second Mythbuster. But he can't be ignored; he's made a good point. Although the network upgrades have already started, broadband access will take a long time to percolate through to everyone and will cost a lot to start with: apart from anything else, the innards of an ADSL or cable modem don't come cheap at the moment. By contrast, you can buy a telephone modem for next to nothing now and off you go; as an experiment I (Alastair) did this, resurrecting an old PC from work whose destiny was landfill. For an initial investment of £24.95 I'm on the Internet at 56K speed. Then there's the much more serious issue that the United Kingdom cannot afford to wait even 18 months or 2 years for unmetered broadband access to appear; every day other countries have any sort of unmetered access they move a little further ahead of us. Certainly in the long run broadband and wireless solutions will be the way most people, including me, will access the Internet. But, for people who can't afford or don't want these, there's plenty of room at the bottom. I remember that, when the Web first became usable, there was much speculation that Usenet would the first part of the 'original' Internet to fall. Instead it's going stronger than ever; there's still much to be said in plain old text.