TELECOMMUNICATIONS CAMPAIGNERS PRAISE SCREAMING.NET AS A FIRST STEP

London, 29 April 1999

For immediate release

The Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications [CUT] strongly praises
screaming.net, a new Internet Service Provider offering off-peak access
at no charge, as a first step towards fairer telecommunications charging
for all.

Alastair Scott, Moderator of CUT, explains:

"We're delighted that Tempo and LocalTel, the partners in the venture,
have made a bold step which, for once, takes account of what
telecommunications users in this country want. At last, for some of the
time, the ticking of the clock and the ratcheting up of the bill will no
longer be an issue; screaming.net tackles the principal barrier to
Internet access in this country, which is open-ended telecommunications
charges.

We hope that such a radical offer will wake up, in particular, the cable
companies.

But screaming.net is merely a first step: the service meets only a small
part of our campaign aims. There are many issues it doesn't touch: for
example, anything to do with voice calls; the excessive cost of Internet
access during weekdays; the minimum call charge; secrecy about the costs
of call provision; the lack of coherence in regulatory and Government
policy and, probably most important of all for the future of this
country, delays to the rollout of broadband Internet access methods such
as cable modems and xDSL.

The offer is also numerically and geographically limited; we've been
bombarded with emails from people outside the Midlands and South of
England desperate to get hold of the special CD-ROM which is needed to
sign up to the service.

As an aside, we've found that traffic to our site, together with people
signing up to the aims of CUT and becoming members, has greatly
increased since the announcement."

Note for Editors

The screaming.net Internet Service Provider, set up by the Midlands and
South of England electrical retail chain Tempo, offers calls to it at no
charge between 6pm and 8am all day and at weekends provided that the
subscriber signs over their BT (not cable) line to LocalTel, Tempo's
telecommunications partner.

http://www.screaming.net/

Contact:

Erol Ziya
Press Officer, Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications
press@unmetered.org.uk

http://www.unmetered.org.uk/

+44 171 681 2831