The proposed free Minitel-type service from British Telecommunications Plc has had a gestation that makes that of an elephant look positively hasty, but the company says that it is still contemplating such a service to increase usage of the public network and of Prestel: a minor step forward is that the company says that it is satisfied that handing out free terminals could now be cost-justified by the extra amount of network traffic it would generate – and someone would then be in line for an extremely high-volume manufacturing contract.
