Organisers of an Internet strike in Germany say they have succeeded in crippling the network.

They said that traffic was 70% down and more than 6,000 home pages went offline when action was taken on Sunday.

Deutsche Telekom, which was being targeted for not reducing its rates sufficiently to enable affordable Internet access, said only 1,450 sites took part.

It argues that since prices are coming down, so there was no rational reason for the strike.

The official site for the strike said the protest would be repeated next Sunday. Users had been urged to stay offline and deny Deutsche Telekom revenues, while Websites went dark for the day to demonstrate their opposition to high charges.

The strike leaders, an online club known as DarkBreed, wants a special rate of one mark (63 cents) an hour for access to Deutsche Telekom's T-online service.

The current daytime rate for ordinary phone calls is around five marks an hour. Phone bills for even moderate Net users can amount to 100 marks a month on top of monthly access charges.

Telecommunications competition was opened up in the European Union on January 1. But the continent still lags behind the United States in providing the free-local-calls access that has fuelled the phenomenal growth of Net usage on the other side of the Atlantic.

Telefonica SA, which had held a telecommunications monopoly in Spain, announced discounts for heavy Net users earlier this year after protests over a rise in local call rates.

In the UK, the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications was launched in April to lobby for free local calls.