In a thinly veiled attempt to show how influential it's been at driving down Net access costs in Britain, Oftel now claims that seven million UK homes (28 per cent) are now connected to the Internet, with almost one million homes going on line in the three months to August.

It also claims that more than one and half million domestic subscribers are now using an unmetered package to access the Internet.

Is that so? One and a half million? In excess of?

A quick head count of the major ISPs providing unmetered access - Freeserve, BT and ntl - accounts for, at the most, 600,000 users.

Does Oftel really expect us to believe that AOL UK (just entered the unmetered market and marks its headcount in tens of thousands) World Online and the others (lets be honest, there aren't many unmetered ISPs left anymore) make up nearly a million users?

Pull the other one Oftel, it's got local loops on it. ®