Phone costs
Like Richard Hornby (Feedback, July 29), I too am disturbed by the high phone bills caused by internet usage. Although BT has announced technology to make access via a normal line up to 40 times faster, it seems less enthusiastic about telling us how much this wonderful technology will cost and, surprisingly, there is a sizeable price tag.

It seems unlikely BT will be willing to give up its profits, so local call charges will be with us for quite a while.

But how about a cheaper rate for internet users? Is it fair that virtually all of Britain should lag behind in one of the most important mediums of the 21st century?
Viral Thakerar
Harrow

It is utterly naive of Richard Hornby to imagine that the end of BT's monopoly on the provision of local calls will lead to massive reductions in his phone bills.

This could only happen if other telecoms providers were to establish their own, completely separate networks. Instead, they will have to rent line space from BT, which will charge them for the privilege - in turn ensuring that any savings made are marginal at best.

Neither BT nor any other telecoms provider has any commitment to the internet per se, or could give a damn about what's actually carried over their lines: all they care about is the money to be made.

If charging existing users by the minute brings in just as much as charging lots more people a flat-rate access fee, why change?
Joseph Nicholas
josephn@globalnet.co.uk

iBook
A query about Jack Schofield's report on Apple's iBook (Apple does it by the book, July 29): what does he mean by "no ports for a printer or external mouse"?

Is he referring to PC-style parallel printer and PS/2 mouse ports? No Mac in the past 15 years has had these.

These days mice use USB - a cross-platform standard found in every currently shipping PC and Mac. The slow, chunky parallel port is on the way out.

PS. Jack forgot to point out that the iBook doesn't have a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive or a punch-card reader.
Steve West
Edinburgh

My main criticism of the iMac would be its lack of infra-red port, for communicating with mobile phones, PDAs, etc. Mark Etherington
London

It was strange that Jack Schofield failed to mention the "Pentium toasting" performance of the new iMac in a book.

As he must know, the speed of the Mac G3 is around double that of Windows Pentium machines. Hence even the slower G3 266 MHz Power Macs score 9.0 on the independent BYTEmark index, while the 333 MHz standard Windows PC scores just 4.7.

So why did Jack Schofield compare just the numbers - iBook (300 MHz G3) and the Gateway Solo Windows PC (333MHz Intel Celeron) without explaining that the G3 outperforms the PC processor by a factor of two?
Alastair Nisbet
Dorchester Dorset

Good guess
In Games Watch you suggest the new playstation is to be called the Playstation2000. The Network Solutions Whois database reveals that Sony owns playstation2000.com. Probably a pretty good bet you got it right then. David Sargeant
d.sargeant@ickle.com