ALARMS bells started ringing for horrified businessman Muir Morton when he received his quarterly bill from BT.

The itemised bill ran to a staggering 2,054 pages, and came in a large cardboard box instead of the usual envelope.

And Mr Morton was facing a whopping £5,632 charge.

The bill claimed 12,586 calls had been made within a month on an ISDN line from a computer at his York print shop, Niceglobe Ltd, to the Internet. His quarterly bill usually comes to about £175.

But when Mr Morton analysed the itemised sheets, and queried the matter with BT, it emerged that a digit had probably been left off the number, and 125,860 calls had in fact been made.

He said BT had claimed that because of a computer configuration, the equipment had been automatically re-dialling the Net about once every ten seconds for a month.

But Mr Morton said he had asked an engineer to investigate, and he had been unable to find any evidence of a fault.

Now BT has agreed to drop about £4,500 of the bill as a goodwill gesture.

Mr Morton said today his experience should serve as a warning to any business or individual using the Internet.

"Everybody, from Tony Blair downwards, is talking about the Internet, and how businesses should make full use of it and enjoy all the potential benefits," he said.

"But you hear very little about the potential problems that can arise, and I would just like others to be aware of these."

He also suggested BT should use technology to detect obvious faults in the system before such enormous bills were run up.

He said he understood domestic customers were warned when extraordinarily large numbers of calls were made from their phones.

A BT spokesman said it had a system in place to detect exceptionally high call rates and alert a customer of the fact.

"However, this is mainly used to detect fraud and in this particular case, although the bill was much higher than usual, when broken down over 90 days it did not trigger daily amounts to raise realistic concern.

"It is in our customers' best interests to be familiar with the software attached to their phone lines and ensure it is configured correctly to avoid such situations."

The spokesman added that under new ADSL technology coming shortly to York, users could pay a fixed monthly charge giving them permanent access to the Internet, immediately eradicating customers' concerns over call charges.