BT is to offer unmetered WAP access for £20 a month through Genie, its consumer mobile data brand.

And - get this - Genie boss Laurence Aleander says: "Flat rates are driving growth in fied line internet access. The same will happen with the mobile internet."

Which is true enough. Only BT has been slower than a dying snail in moving the UK over to unmetered access on the fixed lines, where it operates a monopoly still over the last mile (or local loop) to people's homes.

On the mobile side - it is just one company among many - it's up against four carriers for a start, one of which, Vodafone, is bigger in terms of customers, and another, Orange, has been growing much faster.

However, on the mobile Internet side, BT does appear to be doing something right. Genie, is the UK's biggest consumer mobile portal by far, with a half a million WAP subscribers. The service racked up 15 million page impressions in October, not bad for something that is still painfully slow and - until yesterday's announcement - bloody expensive.

Amazing, isn't it, what BT is capable of, when it is just another me-too company, and not a public monopoly. ®