In the UK, cable companies are best (and most reliable) for Internet connection. If there's a cable company in your area, go for that. Kingston Comms, NTL, etc all give out free unlimited Internet access as part of the package.

Trouble is that in the country, there's no cable access so you're stuck with BT lines. There are schemes for this where you change to another provider for billing purposes and get free unlimited Internet access from them - LocalTel, etc. This seems to be OK, but some of the smaller companies are running out of money and going bust.

The curious fact though is that it costs BT more to monitor who's calling where than it does to actually put the call through. The figures I got from a friend in telecoms were that around 80% of the processing in telecoms systems is just tracking where the calls come from and go to, and how long they are - only 20% is actually devoted to putting the call through. Ditching the "price per minute" structure for calls in favour of a fixed price per month would not only benefit Internet users, it would also make things cheaper for general phone users by requiring less infrastructure.

Grab.