Micronet 800 costs £56.00 to join. There is in addition a rental charge of £1.00 per week. You may also incur further charges if you access Prestel during office hours (or Saturday before 1pm), or if you make use of charged pages, or the teleshopping facility. All charges apart from the joining fee are added to your quarterly telephone bill.

For your money you get a modem which takes a standard telephone handset, and which plugs into the RS423 port on the Beeb (Model B only). It is accompanied by software on cassette (at 300 baud only, unfortunately). To access Micronet, you first load the software, then dial one of the Telecom Prestel computers on your telephone, then place the handset on the modem. Once you have entered your personal identity number (supplied by Prestel) and your password, you are logged into Prestel and Micronet; giving you a potential 200,000 pages of information.

Each page is a full colour Teletext screen, and takes only a few seconds to download. As with Prestel, you can select any desired page by keying in the page number (you are provided with a printed index both for Prestel and for Micronet). Alternatively you can use the extensive menu facilities to find your way around. On Prestel you can always begin on page 1, and branch successively through subsequent indexes until you arrive at the desired topic.

Micronet is a subset of Prestel accessible only to Micronet members.

It offers an interesting range of facilities for the BBC user. There are regularly updated pages, a classified ads section, a letter-answering service, a new hints and tips section and a telesoftware section. This latter facility, together with Prestel's Mailbox service and a banking service called Homelink, exploits the medium admirably, and each deserves a closer look.

The Mailbox area of Prestel allows you to send messages of all kinds to any Prestel user, including comments to the Micronet team itself. You do this by selecting a response frame, and typing in and editing text. If you choose to send the frame, the addressee (you get his Mailbox number from an on-screen directory) will be informed that a letter is waiting for him the next time he logs on or off. He can then access the frame which you created. The full Mailbox service is presently only available on the Prestel's Enterprise Computer (London Area), but other computers are expected to offer this soon. By a similar process it is possible to do teleshopping (with a credit card number) or to order free brochures etc. These latter facilities are already available generally.

The system software supplied with the Micronet 800 kit allows you to save selected Teletext screens to tape or disc, or to send them to a printer. For this latter facility you must have a parallel connected printer (the serial port is used for the modem). Even more interesting is the facility to download software directly, at the press of a key. Some software on Micronet is free, and the quality of this is varied, others (such as a range of Acornsoft products) is charged to your next telephone bill. In either case, when you choose to download, the screen fills with mostly meaningless characters for a number of frames (a frame for every 1k of program approximately).

Error checks are made on each frame, and if there is an error, the frame is automatically re-sent. Once downloaded, you can press a key to save the program to cassette or disc, from where it can be chained in as normal at a later date.

This is a new facility currently offered jointly by Prestel, the Nottingham Building Society, and the Bank of Scotland. It allows Prestel and Micronet users to access deposit and current accounts, pay bills and call up on-screen statements, all from their keyboard at home. To join the scheme you must have at least £1000 invested with the Nottingham Building Society (but full interest is given on this).

We shall be investigating this service, and will report back. In the meantime further details can be obtained on page 444 of Prestel, or by dialling the operator, and asking for Freefone HOMELINK. Note that investors with more than £3000 on deposit, receive a modem from Homelink free of charge.

My privately ordered Micronet apparatus took around 5 weeks to arrive, which was a little longer than I had hoped, but by no means unreasonable. I should perhaps add that the reason that we have taken so long to review Micronet is that the review kit that we were promised months ago has yet to arrive. Eventually we gave up, and ordered one privately. This unit worked first time around, though the Prestel first page which requests your identity number invariably fails to appear, and small dashes appear at the top of the screen. These are responses to the keyboard. If you press the keyboard a few more times the logging-on frame usually arrives.

Generally the system software works well, though it could be improved somewhat by making it automatically configure for various operating systems etc (the user must do this manually at present). The software could also make better use of the function keys on the new operating system so as to allow the user to program his own keys with his favourite page numbers, and with his identity number to automate the loggingon process.

The only real problem which I encountered was caused by noise on the telephone line. This can result in corrupted pictures, and can give problems with telesoftware; though the error-checking mechanism ensured faultless downloads in our tests. I personally found that a proportion of calls initially gave badly corrupted frames; though adjusting the position of the handset as suggested in the manual often solved the problem.

In my own estimation, and in that of other members who have contacted us, using Micronet is a useful and entertaining adjunct to the Beeb. It provides a wealth of facilities and a myriad of pages through which to browse. The great thing about it is that it is fully interactive, and that pages are regularly updated. Micronet clearly puts Acorn's promised £100 Prestel adaptor in the shade, though theirs 1is a direct-connect device with auto-dialling. Micronet too have one of these on the stocks.

I am particularly grateful to Mark Sealey and George Foot for their detailed comments about Micronet.

For further details, contact: Micronet 800, Durrant House, 8 Herbal Hill, London EC1R 5JB.