When you lease a telephone line it’s yours for the period that you lease it, right? Well not exactly, not in West Germany, anyway: the Deutsche Bundespost, an example of perfection in action to us all if we are to believe the letters we get whenever we criticise it, has decided that it wants to add a charge based on data traffic volume on top of the price of leasing lines, so that the IBM-sponsored European Academic and Research Network that links 700 computers at 400 sites, mainly in Europe, and has almost a third of its users in Germany, says it must give up four of its five leased lines in Germany because it can’t afford the charge.
