Wherefore unmetered access and grammer good

As it turns out, AltaVista itself has ended up with a red face. The hunt is now officially over: AltaVista, despite claiming it had many happy customers using its unmetered net access package, has finally admitted that it never actually launched the service.

Which is slightly embarrassing. But on Monday evening, Andy Mitchell, UK managing director of AltaVista, was fairly keen to point out that it wasn't his fault, guvnor. The company issued this statement on his behalf: "AltaVista access is the symptom, not the cause. We are reliant on the provision of flat rate circuits from BT, direct to the end user, to be able to offer a service that is sustainable, quality-focused, and economically viable. To date BT has failed to make this possible and its continuing delays make it difficult to plan a solution."

He went on to say that BT may not make cheap third party access across the local loop available until January next year and noted that in the meantime BT will have launched its own unmetered access service.

So the pointy, filthy finger of blame is thrust once more in the direction of the UK's favourite telco.

Fair or unfair? Well, five of the UK's largest telcos seem to think that BT is indeed to blame for many of the country's online ills, and are threatening to take it to court for failing to deliver wholesale, unmetered internet access.

Sources told us that the telcos - which are thought to include Colt, Cable and Wireless, Energis, Thus and Telinco - have reached a stalemate in their negotiations with BT over flat rate net access on the local loop, a service called Friaco.

One of our mystery contacts said the telcos have grown increasingly frustrated with BT's plans to include a per minute charge between the local and regional exchange on top of the flat rate charge to the end user.

However, the sticking point apparently comes down to whether the operators should connect directly to all the local exchanges or just a percentage of them. "There is a consensus among telcos about what is reasonable - the only one that doesn't agree is BT, after all it doesn't need to. I would not be surprised if there is legal action."

But that's enough about the Friaco fiasco this Friday.

The excitement of alliteration will never wane. But it turns out that the rules of language are changing in the brave new world of the net. This column has obviously arrived in front of your eyes via the magic of email nevertheless, we do try to avoid geek speak (you know, emoticons, silly abbreviations, writing everything in lower case, that sort of thing).

But on the whole, email is a funny creature: some research conducted by marketing consultancy The Fourth Room has found that net speak (which it refers to as 'weblish') is rewriting the rules of communication. In the online world, the company's survey found that the apostrophe is dead. Spelling mistakes are acceptable. Writing emails in lower case is 'fine for creative professionals' (which means capitals are the preserve of uncreative types, we presume).

According to the research, language on the net does not reflect class or geography. A digitally literate group of people is taking away the power to shape and define language from the 'usual suspects' - political leaders, teachers and (heaven forbid) newspaper editors.

Cor. I may be digitally literate (well, sort of), but I for one always try and stick to good grammer and speling, I endeavour to correctly refrain from splitting infinitives, and will do my utmost to avoid dangling prepositions in the stories which my by-line appears on.

But while the digitally literate are reshaping language, we're not doing enough to reshape employment practices (yep, it's back to ageism again). Three weeks ago, we published a rant from a recruitment consultant who thought we were attempting 'social engineering' by daring to suggest that the IT industry might have a few 'issues' with employing people of more mature years. He thought we were mad to promulgate this 'left-wing' clap-trap, claiming that the free market economy works perfectly well.

Can he, then, answer the conundrum highlighted by a reader in Reading. He emailed us, saying: "I was 50 and had grown lazily confident about cruising towards retirement when at the end of 1999 I was handed the black spot and told to go further my career outside of the large corporate IT structure I had grown comfortable in.

"I was lucky in that I was offered the services of a professional "Career Realignment" company and they helped me stop panicking. I am not unskilled I have highly developed WAN, LAN and similar knowledge so a CV was constructed by the end of February, and was posted to a number of companies advertising for my skill set. I had ZERO replies. So I reworked the CV by removing my age and birthdate, again it was sent out and I got replies from around 80 per cent of the applications. I eventually had three firm job offers..."

Here endeth today's lesson. The Round-Up will be back to preach again next week.