No change
Complaining about BT and the local loop is all very well. I subscribed to cable telephone five years ago hoping for better, faster internet access. Despite my phone company having been taken over twice - each time by international corporations promising better service - I am still waiting. Martin Rathfelder
weasel@cwcom.net

Service free
I was interested to read a letter about 4unet's failings regarding non-delivery and no refund. My problem is similar but in respect of Callnet0800's failings. I had my £20 for a dialler taken four months ago. I never received the dialler or the service. I have written three times for a refund and have not even had an acknowledgment. To compound my anger, I now read that requests for 4unet refunds are being handled by Callnet! What is going on? Peter McSorley
peter.mcsorley@lineone.net

Not so smart
I wish that your report about Mondex in Hong Kong were true. The reality is (as usual) more complicated.

The Octopus smartcard system can at present only be used for public transport and in a few other ways. Frustratingly, you can only transfer money on to this smartcard by putting banknotes into a machine at the station - in theory you can use your bank card, but this rarely works.

One of the smaller banks offers the facility to automatically transfer money to the card when the balance falls below zero, but customers of HSBC, Bank of China and Standard Chartered cannot do this. Meanwhile, Mondex is not widely used. Bring the facilities of the two systems together and you would have a winning solution, but I guess we'll have to wait.
Chris Tringham
ctringham@hotmail.com

Your recent piece on internet payments says the ideal system would be "good for small as well as large transactions". But there's a world of difference between secure online payment for say, booking a round-the-world cruise or a modest fee for visiting a commercially viable site.

I make frequent use of free online language translations, for which I'd happily pay a nominal amount. Perhaps this is where a widely available prepayment card would score? Mobile phones only took off when an alternative to the red tape of contracts, credit checks etc came along.

So when will "the average punter" be able to buy a £10 card in a local shop, allowing them to go to a popular entertainment site like Eastenders for 10p a visit?

This would generate tremendous income for all concerned and is hardly likely to be resented by the various fans who seem happy to shell out vast sums on all kinds of spin-off merchandising.

Obviously, there should not be a charge for information services such as rail time- tables, but lifestyle, sport, entertainment and general leisure sites would welcome this as much as the rest of us would appreciate the absence of banner ads, which would become redundant.
Grey Taylor
snazz.media@virgin.net

High cost
Jack Schofield says in his Ask Jack column (August 17) that CD-RW disks will cost about £2 each - not on the High Street they won't! I recently needed to transfer a fair bit of data from one PC to another and thought that CD-RW would be the easiest way of doing it, but had left my disks in the office. I popped out to my local shopping centre and found them priced at £9.99 in Stationery Box, £14.99 at Dixons and Currys, and £17.99 at a stationers.

I have bought them at computer fairs for £1.25, so I don't know how the shops can justify such prices.
Chris Quinn
chris@cquinn.freeserve.co.uk

Bit part
The BBC is not exactly a shining example when it comes to compressed digital video, as Matt Pyne suggests. On digital satellite the BBC originally opted for a reasonable transfer rate (around 5Mbps, I believe). Recently, however, they have clearly been experimenting with much lower bit rates and higher compression is leading to poorer pictures. On BBC News 24 for example, the picture is regularly prone to pixelation and breaks up every time there is rapid movement (or a picture dissolve). It seems that digital TV may give us worse, not better pictures than analogue TV. Amazingly the BBC, of all organisations, is leading the way downmarket. Nigel Curson
nige@mayvilla.demon.co.uk

How to roam
There is an alternative to Global Roaming for friends visiting the UK from abroad. It is to adapt your software so they can send mail through your UK ISP and receive mail directly from their foreign ISP, assuming they want to use their regular email address and don't want to open a free ISP account. Without going into detail the principles are (using Eudora 3.1 on the Mac): Make a duplicate Settings file and rename it as you like, eg with your friends name. Double click the duplicate, and under Special Menu, Settings, change Real Name to the friend's name, enter their own foreign POP account and their own foreign Return Address. Leave the SMTP Server as your own UK SMTP server.

Your friend then logs on using your normal dial-up software, eg Remote Access or FreePPP Setup, dialing in to your regular ISP, and starts Eudora by double-clicking on their own Settings file.

Their mail will appear to come from their regular email address, but anyone opting to see full headers on their mail will see that its actually originating from the UK ISP.
Pete Lennard
peter@hands.free-online.co.uk

CD editing
It might be worth pointing out in your column (Ask Jack, August 17) that it is possible to edit files on a rewriteable CD using Adaptec's Direct CD software, which allows you, in most respects, to treat the CD as if it's another hard disk drive.

Windows 98's Microsoft Backup, however, doesn't recognise the drive, so you can't use it for backing up without additional software.
Donald Gunn
donald@culloden4.freeserve.co.uk