The Best and Worst ISPs
The votes are in: Our readers cast their ballots for national and regional Internet service providers. From these survey results, plus our in-depth performance testing and features comparisons, we determine the best ISP in the land.Gregg Keizer
Getting involved with a caring Internet service provider can lead to a wonderful relationship. For example, Amy Hurka-Owen of Mebane, North Carolina, loves her local Internet service provider, Intrex.net. She loves the way its support personnel jump to help her solve a problem, and she loves the fact that she's never gotten a busy signal.
That hasn't stopped Hurka-Owen, who teaches at nearby Elon College, from thinking about dropping that ISP like a stone. "I've been trying Road Runner this month," she says of Time Warner's cable modem-based Internet service, "and I don't think I can bear to go back to my local provider. Cable is so much faster. With Web pages now so graphical, I think we'll all be forced to go to higher speed and faster connections."
The only stumbling block to her switch is the price: more than double what she pays the local ISP she loves so much. But even though the higher cost may stretch her family's budget, Hurka-Owen can't get over the faster downloads and the way Web pages snap into place. "It's just a speed issue," she says, explaining why she's on the verge of switching.
Hurka-Owen has plenty of company. Millions of Web users are hungry for faster Internet speed, more reliable service, and better support. With the ISP picture mutating faster than a politician's positions in November, now's the time to see if you've got the right connections.
Many Ports in a Storm
The ISP business is huge. According to Boardwatch,a publication that covers the ISP market, more than 7400 Internet service providers now compete for consumer and small-business customers. But the big daddy remains America Online. With membership estimated at 21.4 million by Internet analyst firm Jupiter Communications, AOL dwarfs every other ISP.
Not that others don't dream of challenging AOL's preeminence. EarthLink and MindSpring merged earlier this year, and long-distance telephone carrier Sprint Communications subsequently bought a quarter of the combined company. In June, SBC Communications, parent company of Ameritech, Pacific Bell, and Southwestern Bell, agreed to combine its consumer and small-business Internet operations with Prodigy Internet. The following month, national provider GTE and regional provider Bell Atlantic merged and renamed the result Verizon Online. (Both groups still offer slightly different services depending on where you live, so we've continued to list them separately in our chart.)
Meanwhile, cable providers like AT&T Cable and Time Warner frantically wire homes for the Web as well as for TV, and regional telephone companies and large ISPs push Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) access. EarthLink says it will have 150,000 DSL customers by the end of the year, out of its 3.7 million customers.
Then there's the joker of all ISP jokers: free Internet service providers. Led by NetZero, which claims a whopping 2 million active users, the free Web access services have made a big splash. "The free services are going for AOL subscribers, and those of other service providers," says Zia Daniell Wigder, a senior analyst at Jupiter Communications. "It's much cheaper to get someone [as a member who is] already online."
Innovative partnerships between ISPs and unrelated businesses mark another major shift in the Internet services market. These "affinity groups," as Wigder calls them, offer free or cheap Internet service as a way of promoting their brands. Some alliances, such as the one between brick-and-mortar retailer Kmart and online powerhouse Yahoo, result in free services like BlueLight.com; others, like the deals struck by AOL with Sears, Target, and Wal-Mart, are merely partnerships in which the retailers try to recruit customers for AOL in exchange for a bounty. Other outlets provide cobranded free access, ranging from the unexpected (the Democratic Party and online brokerage Ameritrade) to the downright wacky (The Simpsons and Seventeen magazine).
These partnerships enable companies to reach the not-yet-online users, but the strategy has also convinced some long-time Net heads to switch to free access--or to keep it as a backup to their paid provider. "There's simply no reason to pay for full access," Wigder says. Our survey respondents, however, don't agree: They see plenty of reasons, from download performance to support, to pay for access.
In our exclusive survey of 2053 PC World subscribers who were personally involved in selecting an ISP (see "Surveying the ISP Landscape"), we uncovered additional trends. Local ISP use, participants report, is falling fast. Eighteen months ago, when we last reviewed consumer ISPs, nearly half of the respondents said they connected through a local provider. Today, fewer than 25 percent subscribe to a local service. More than half connect via a national provider, and 16 percent use a regional ISP.
Pay or free, fast or slow, busy signals or a clear line--you still have a ton of choices. With high-quality Web access available in most parts of the country, there's no reason to compromise, and it's easy to shop around. To help you, we've examined 15 major providers: the nine top national ISPs and six major regional providers. Unfortunately, we can't cover local ISPs due to their relatively low number of subscribers and scattered locations.
We assessed these 15 ISPs from three angles. To get a feel for real-world speed and reliability, we contracted with Visual Networks of Rockville, Maryland, for ISP performance testing. We polled more than 2000 PCWorld.com visitors about their satisfaction with their own ISPs, including our 15 and nearly 500 local providers. And we talked with dozens of users personally, to dig into the whys and what-fors of their ISP choices, experiences, and expectations.
National ISPs Rank Highest
There may be more ISPs in your area than cereals in the supermarket, but providers come in only three flavors: national, regional, and local. National ISPs, naturally enough, cover virtually the entire country with their networks of dial-up nodes. Connection points typically run in the hundreds, if not the thousands. This strength in numbers means that no matter where you are, you can probably connect through a local phone call (though rural locations continue to suffer a shortage of connection options). Frequent travelers benefit most by going with a national like AOL or AT&T WorldNet, but nationals have other advantages, too. Of the five ISPs our poll takers rated highest for overall satisfaction, four are nationals.
Regional providers usually cover several states, just as the Baby Bells do for telephone service. In fact, the primary regional ISPs arethe Baby Bells, including Ameritech, BellSouth, and Qwest (formerly U.S. West). Regionals offer some of the advantages of nationals--in particular, widespread dial-up--but their biggest advantage is extensive DSL service, typically more widespread than even national ISPs offer. All six regional ISPs we covered offer DSL connections, and 10 percent of survey respondents who were personally involved in selecting their ISP and who use a regional service connect via DSL.
Local ISPs tie users to distinct locales--access numbers rarely exist outside of town. In addition, according to our poll, locals charge an average of $2.20 more per month than the nationals. Their selling point? Better, more personalized support: As a group, local ISPs beat nearly all the national and regional providers on that score in our poll.
Eventually, broadband could take an even bigger bite out of the locals' market share. "Local providers aren't losing a significant chunk of the market to broadband [providers]...yet," says Jupiter's Wigder. "But going forward [broadband access] is going to be a bigger part of the market." Local ISPs, which generally lag behind regionals and nationals in fast access, may have trouble matching the larger companies in providing broadband-specific content like audio and video.
High Speed Ahead
There's no such thing as a too-fast connection. Nearly three-fourths of respondents to our survey now use a 56-kbps modem to connect to the Internet--30 percent more than in 1999, when one in five still used a 33.6-kbps or slower modem. But users are still not satisfied with the speed of their connection. Over 40 percent say that they're likely to change ISPs or to upgrade to a faster Internet connection in the next 12 months. The rest say that they won't upgrade because of the increased cost, or because DSL or cable isn't yet available in their area.
The demand for more speed is constant because of flaky phone lines, heavy-on-multimedia Web pages, and plain old impatience. Performance is customers' number one priority when scouting for an ISP, our survey indicates. Yet only half of our respondents say they're satisfied with what they get. Lowest on the speed ladder: AOL and Prodigy, with just a third of users giving them a thumbs-up. But that doesn't stop millions, including George LeMien of Bethel, Connecticut, from using AOL. "I like [AOL's] ease of use, especially how it helps guide me around the Net," LeMien explains.
When Visual Networks conducted some real-world tests--timing how long it took to retrieve thousands of Web pages, plus measuring connection success rates, time to log in, and other gauges--the top performers were clear. Of the ISPs we reviewed, only AT&T WorldNet and BellSouth received Outstanding marks in overall performance. Concentric, GTE, and Quest earned Good ratings, while seven providers--Ameritech, AOL, Bell Atlantic, CompuServe, EarthLink/MindSpring, JunoWeb, and Southwestern Bell--pulled Fair scores. MSN and Pacific Bell staggered in with Poor grades.
AOL and CompuServe's Fair ratings come with a catch. Each uses a proprietary compression scheme to reduce Web images' file sizes so they can be downloaded more quickly (but at the expense of image quality). As a result, AOL and CompuServe lead all ISPs in Visual Networks' Web page time trials. However, they aren't apples-to-apples tests--the other ISPs were ranked on their ability to download pages with a larger total file size (the company doesn't test file download speeds). The proof: AOL came in dead last in average throughput (the amount of data it could download per second), and CompuServe did only a hair better. This may not matter to some users, though. "If you just surf," says Visual Networks' Steve Slater, "AOL's great."
Dial 911 for Broadband
Though some ISPs provide fast dial-up service, many modem users are getting antsy for broadband services. Already, one in six respondents to our survey connects to the Net via those services. "There's no comparison between the two [analog and broadband] when it comes to speed," says Preston Ward, of Irvine, California. Ward switched to a cable connection almost two years ago, and won't go back even though his monthly fee is now twice what EarthLink charged him for dial-up access.
"It's definitely worth the money," says Joe Anderson, of Marietta, Georgia, a financial analyst and recent convert to cable-based Net access. "I'm disabled, and my outside world is the Internet."
CompuServe and MSN don't offer DSL or cable access, though both say they're considering offering faster access next year. Other major players, such as AOL and EarthLink, currently provide broadband service only to limited markets. Check with your current ISP about its broadband offerings (or plans to roll them out), but don't hesitate to switch providers to get faster service. "I kept my old ISP for about a month after I'd signed up with AT&T's @Home just to be on the safe side," says Kay Cahill, an independent salesperson in Great Falls, Montana. "But I was really happy with @Home, so I dropped my local ISP."
Cost and Ease of Access
After performance, our poll respondents who use national ISPs rated cost the second most important feature of a service. Interestingly, local and regional ISP users list cost as their biggest concern, even though they pay more on average than they would for a national provider.
Most ISPs we reviewed cost $20 to $22 per month for personal Internet access. The cheapest, JunoWeb, charges just $10 a month. Juno also offers free access, but the paid service gets you free support, priority access, and additional dial-up nodes. Bear in mind, many ISPs charge less if you pay for six months' or a year's worth of service in advance. Ameritech's annual prepaid plan, for instance, comes out to less than $18 per month.
The monthly charge isn't all you may have to pay, though. Some services levy start-up charges, ranging from $15 at several regionals we surveyed to a relatively steep $25 at EarthLink (though you can avoid EarthLink's charge by signing up online). Three ISPs--Bell Atlantic, GTE, and AT&T WorldNet--ding you a buck for each hour that you stay online past their limit of 150 hours per month.
Last year, only a third of the ISPs we reviewed allowed multiple e-mail accounts at no extra charge; such accounts are a blessing for families and small businesses. Today, two-thirds do. AOL and CompuServe lead the charge by permitting seven addresses each, while AT&T is not far behind with six. A half dozen ISPs, meanwhile, continue to offer a single e-mail account at the base price and make you pay for additional ones.
If you're looking for a guide to Internet content as well as a connection to it, check your ISP candidates for features such as customizable home pages and ready-to-use Web guides or directories. Two-thirds of our reviewed ISPs provide personal start pages. Of course, you can always set up with a Web portal (for example, Excite or Yahoo) to do the same thing.
Busy Signal Blues
If you frequently can't log on because of constant busy signals, or if you have to connect via a long-distance number, your ISP is as useful as a knife in soup. Our survey respondents agree: They voted log-on success and a local access number as their third and fourth most important ISP assets (after speed and price). Not surprisingly, a local number scored as the second most crucial characteristic for users of local ISPs.
"I could live with the slow speed of my [former] ISP," says Craig Becker, a petroleum geologist who lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, "but anytime you wanted to log on, it would take 30 tries." Needless to say, he's switched providers.
To stress-test our 15 ISPs, Visual Networks dialed each one at least 3525 times at all times of the day and all over the country to tally log-on success, then broke out the resulting figures into business and evening hours.
AT&T WorldNet, BellSouth, and CompuServe earned the only Outstanding ratings in log-on efficiency, each achieving a success rate of 98 percent or better. AOL ranked as Poor; but MSN, Pacific Bell, and Southwestern Bell received the lowest grade: Unacceptable. The failure rate of calls was more than eight times higher to MSN than to AT&T. Based on Visual Networks' tests, you have about a one-in-ten chance of not getting logged on to MSN each time you dial. "One of our access providers suffered a national outage [during the months we tested]," offered an MSN spokesperson as explanation for the high call failure rate. The outage subsequently prompted MSN to switch to another provider.
For the most part, the results of our survey of real-world users mirror Visual Networks' conclusions. AOL users, for instance, are the least happy with their log-on and connection experience, while those who connect to AT&T WorldNet are among the top five most satisfied.
Sign-Up and Support
Signing up with a new ISP can be a hassle. Sure enough, we heard several horror stories. "It was a nightmare," says Joe Anderson of his experience switching to cable-access provider Media One (recently merged with AT&T). The setup trashed his Windows Registry, forcing him to reformat his hard drive, and left him without Web access for a month.
But Anderson's experience seems to have been an exception: Our respondents describe themselves as mostly happy with their ISPs' installation and setup. National and local ISP users give their provider an excellent rating, with scores of 78 and 77 percent, respectively. AOL, AT&T WorldNet, and EarthLink/MindSpring, scored even higher. (Too few regional ISP users responded to the installation question to provide meaningful results.)
The easiest way to get up and running with a new ISP--registering at a Web site--is available only to people already online. This process commonly involves downloading software that walks you through the registration and often includes a customized browser. Only two of our ISPs--Concentric and Qwest--don't offer this option. Alternatively, you should be able to phone in for a free CD that contains the necessary software. Every ISP we evaluated provides this option.
Suffering Support
The Web is amazing when everything works. But when something does go wrong--whether it be constantly dropped connections or shaky software--the experience can be amazingly awful. So it should come as no surprise that four out of five respondents to our survey admit they've had to ask for help at some time.
Support issues convinced Kay Cahill to switch ISPs recently. "I kept getting booted off [my old ISP] before I could even get started," she recalls. They told me to change this, change that, but nothing seemed to help." So she dropped the local provider and signed up with @Home instead. Later, after her husband inadvertently disconnected the cable modem, she called for help. Cahill says, "They had someone out to the house in about an hour. I was impressed."
You can't expect house calls like that from every ISP, but you should insist on solid service and support. Too bad so few of our ISPs came through. Only AT&T WorldNet and EarthLink/MindSpring earned Outstanding service and support satisfaction ratings in our poll. Of the rest, only GTE gained a Good mark, five received a rating of Fair, and a dismaying four sank to our lowest rating, Poor: Prodigy Internet and three regional ISPs--BellSouth, Pacific Bell, and Southwestern Bell. Local ISPs, meanwhile, collected a Good ranking overall.
On the surface, all 15 of our ISPs offer equal support policies--no charge, toll-free, and around-the-clock. But dig a bit deeper, and you'll find that some are worse than others. Bell Atlantic and Southwestern Bell garnered the highest percentage of complaints about support quality. Other ISPs provide exceptional service: Notably, EarthLink/MindSpring sported the lowest percentage of complaints of any ISP, just 6 percent.
Internet Service Provided?
In the ISP game, it's easy to stick with the status quo. But with more providers than ever, and with fast access and free services altering the landscape faster than you can say "TCP/IP," there is no sense in just settling for second best.
"I'm looking for where I can get the most bang for my buck," says Bill Smeltzer, a small-business counselor from Chillicothe, Ohio. "If I find that my ISP doesn't give me the service that it promised, then I'm gone."
Good advice, Bill.
Top Internet Service Providers (chart)
| Service provider | Coverage area | Start-up fee (9/1/00) | Monthly fee | Toll-free access charge (per hour) | Customized start page | Standard number of e-mail accounts | Web site design/ hosting | Automatic credit card billing | Premium service/support available1 | High-speed access | Support (hours/days), charge | Performance rating2 | Service and support satisfaction rating3 | Summary |
| Ameritech 800/638-8775 www.ameritech.net | Midwest | None | $22 | Not available | Yes | 5 | Yes/Yes | Yes | No/No | ISDN/DSL/T1/frame relay | 24/7, toll-free | Fair | 4 | Regional ISP offers adequate performance in some areas, but testing reveals subpar connect speeds. |
| AOL 800/827-6364 www.aol.com | National | None | $22 | $6 | Yes | 7 | Yes/Yes | Yes | No/No | DSL | 24/7, toll-free | Fair | Fair | Though this giant's users now say support has improved over the past year, poor performance (particularly Web throughput) still dogs AOL. |
| Best Buy AT&T WorldNet 800/967-5363 www.att.net | National | None | $205 | $6 | Yes | 6 | Yes/Yes | Yes | Yes/Yes | ISDN/cable/DSL/T1/frame relay/ATM | 24/7, toll-free | Outstanding | Outstanding | First-class performance, satisfied users, and a wide variety of broadband options mark this ISP as the top choice. |
| Bell Atlantic 800/638-2026 www.verizon.net | Northeast | None | $205 | Not available | No | 1 | Yes/Yes | Yes | Yes/Yes | ISDN/DSL/T1/frame relay/ATM | 24/7, toll-free | Fair | Fair | Regional ISP suffers from poor performance during business hours and so-so support grades from users. GTE and Bell Atlantic merged into Verizon, but some services differ. |
| BellSouth 800/436-8638 www.bellsouth.net | Southeast | $15 | $18 | $6 | Yes | 5 | Yes/Yes | Yes | Yes/Yes | ISDN/DSL/T1/frame relay/ATM | 24/7, toll-free | Outstanding | Poor | This ISP below the Mason-Dixon line boasts excellent performance, but users want better support. |
| CompuServe 800/848-8990 www.compuserve.com | National | None | $20 | $6 | Yes | 7 | Yes/Yes | Yes | Yes/Yes | ISDN/T1 | 24/7, toll-free | Fair | Fair | Not a bad pick, though the paucity of broadband options may deter many who want fast access. |
| Concentric Networks 800/939-4262 www.concentric.com | National | None | $20 | $5 | Yes | 5 | Yes/Yes | Yes | Yes/Yes | DSL/T1/frame relay | 24/7, toll-free | Good | 4 | Full suite of business services, but long log-on times and relatively few access numbers make it tough to recommend. |
| EarthLink/MindSpring 800/395-8425 www.earthlink.net | National | $256 | $20 | $5 | Yes | 1 | No/Yes | Yes | Yes/No | ISDN/cable/DSL/T1/frame relay | 24/7, toll-free | Fair | Outstanding | Earns first-rate marks for support and easy installation, but its overall performance is nothing to crow about. |
| GTE Internet 800/927-3000 www.verizon.net | National7 | $15 | $20 | $6 | No | 1 | No/No | No | No/No | ISDN/DSL | 24/7, toll-free | Good | Good | Solid ISP needs to add more features--for example, additional e-mail accounts--and do away with the start-up fee. GTE and Bell Atlantic merged into Verizon, but some services differ. |
| JunoWeb 800/879-5866 www.juno.com | National | None | $10 | Not available | No | 1 | No/No | Yes | No/No | DSL | 24/7, toll-free | Fair | Fair | Proof that sometimes you can get more for less: This ISP beats big-name providers like MSN and AOL in performance and costs half as much. Still, services are limited. |
| Microsoft Network 800/373-3676 www.msn.com | National | None | $22 | Not available | Yes | 1 | No/No | Yes | No/No | ISDN/T1 | 24/7, toll-free | Poor | Fair | 10 percent of calls to this ISP don't get through, a dismal record that undercuts adequate support. |
| Pacific Bell Internet Services 800/708-4638 www.pacbell.net | West | $15 | $22 | Not available | Yes | 5 | No/Yes | No | No/No | ISDN/DSL/T1/frame relay/ATM | 24/7, toll-free | Poor | Poor | Log-on failure rate is second-highest among our reviewed providers. Plus, it's expensive. |
| Prodigy Internet 800/213-0992 www.prodigy.com | National | None | $20 | Not available | No | 1 | Yes/Yes | Yes | Yes/Yes | DSL | 24/7, toll-free | Fair | Poor | Performance has improved from last year, but this ISP ranks dead last among our reviewed nationals in support satisfaction. |
| Qwest Internet Service 800/860-2255 www.qwest.net | Rockies/Northwest | None | $15 | Not available | No | 2 | Yes/Yes | Yes | No/Yes | ISDN/DSL/T1/frame relay/ATM | 24/7, toll-free | Good | 4 | Cheaper than most regionals, this ISP retrieves Web pages almost as quickly as our Best Buy. |
| Southwestern Bell 888/875-6388 www.swbell.com | Southwest | None | $20 | Not available | No | 1 | Yes/Yes | Yes | Yes/Yes | ISDN/DSL/T1/frame relay/ATM | 24/7, toll-free | Fair | Poor | DSL is the one reason to consider this regional ISP; on all other counts, it rates as a mediocre pick. Most ISP services now provided by Prodigy Internet. |
Best Buy
The telephone company ain't what she used to be. Ma Bell has expanded onto the Internet in a big way, and its dial-up service, AT&T WorldNet, wins our Best Buy award by offering outstanding dial-up speed, a high connection success rate, great extras like multiple e-mail boxes, and superior support.
Surveying the ISP Landscape
Who's keeping tabs on the nation's Internet service providers? You are. We surveyed more than 2000 visitors to PCWorld.com to see what users think of their ISPs--and we got an earful. From the people who couldn't wait to tell us how good their provider is, to others who'd rather tell their ISP to stick it, PCWorld.com visitors have strong opinions. What follows are some of the highlights.
Note: All the statistics we cite below refer to survey respondents who said that they were personally involved in the selection of their ISP. --Alan Stafford
14% of respondents use America Online.
17% of those who identify themselves as AOL users say they're either "not very satisfied" or "not at all satisfied" (highest percentage in survey).
30% of AOL users plan to change ISPs in the next 12 months (highest percentage).
18% of MSN users plan to change ISPs in the next 12 months (lowest percentage).
74% say performance is the most important ISP feature (highest percentage).
10% say 800 number access is the least important feature (lowest percentage).
33% of respondents frequently or occasionally participate in chats or online messaging.
38% frequently or occasionally read or post messages to newsgroups.
.01% of respondents connect to the Internet via satellite dish.
16% connect with cable modems or DSL.
41% of respondents plan to upgrade to a faster connection in the next 12 months.
Business Connections
Small businesses and home consumers want the same things from their ISP: a fast connection, a fair price, and solid service and support. Small businesses also use their Internet connections for many of the same reasons as home users. In our poll, businesspeople rank e-mail as their most important online activity, but researching products and services ranks a close second. People who use the Web for business clearly rely on the same ISPs as folks at home: AOL has more business subscribers than any other ISP, according to our poll.
But for business owners and employees, the Web is not a joyride but a critical tool for commerce. "The Web's vital," says petroleum geologist Craig Becker, "not just to maintain software or to keep up with technical support, but to retrieve files from my clients and transfer mine to them." Without the Web, Becker's job would be much more difficult.
Here are some of the things you should look for when you go searching for the right ISP for your business.
Fast connection. To consumers, the Web express lane leads to thousands of MP3 files. To business customers, it means fast connections to customers or the ability to make transactions. Among our business respondents, nearly a third connect via cable, DSL, ISDN, or a T1 line--while half say they're planning to upgrade to a faster connection in the coming year. But switching ISPs can be much more of a headache for companies than for individuals, since it entails notifying customers, changing business cards, and relocating Web sites. Fortunately, many national ISPs offer multiple connection options. AT&T WorldNet leads our 15 ISPs, offering dial-up, cable, or DSL access, as well as pricier options such as T1 and T3 lines. For businesses with less demanding needs, regional providers like BellSouth offer attractive DSL packages. That's one reason why, proportionately, more business users than consumers turn to regionals.
Web hosting. Among consumers, Web hosting barely shows up on the radar as an ISP feature. Not so with businesses: A quarter of the businesspeople we polled pay for Web hosting--four times the percentage of at-home surfers. But hosting is just half the battle for small businesses: They often need help designing a site, setting up an e-commerce storefront, and handling online payments via credit card. Several providers on our list offer these services, but shop carefully--some define "Web hosting" as the pages you build yourself with a form-based tool that's best suited to displaying pictures of your cat.
Premium support. On the whole, business users are less pleased with their ISP's service and support, but they rely on their provider's support more often than do consumers. One way to trump both issues is to pay extra for a premium support plan that guarantees fast response to questions and problems. AT&T WorldNet, CompuServe, Concentric, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Qwest, and Southwestern Bell all provide such plans.
Additional addresses. Nearly one in five business users we polled pays extra for more than one e-mail address. But if you shop around, you can avoid that expense by signing up with an ISP that offers multiple addresses as part of its basic package. This extra may be one factor that draws so many business users to America Online--AOL provides seven addresses, while AT&T offers six, and Concentric, Ameritech, BellSouth, and Pac Bell supply five.
Free Me From ISP Fees
Free lunch? On the Internet, it's available from dozens of providers, as long as you're willing to skip the appetizer and sign the guest book. In return for exposing yourself to ads and, in some cases, revealing lots of personal information, you'll receive dial-up for nothing.
People turn to free services for several reasons beyond the obvious one. Redundancy is another attraction. For those times when your for-fee ISP is down, balky, or busy, "having a backup that you never have to pay for is a great feature," says Steven Harris of research firm IDC.
We reviewed four of the most popular free providers--BlueLight.com, FreeInternet.com, Juno, and NetZero--and found that the list of what you don't get is longer than the list of what you do. The bottom line: Go with a free ISP only if you need a backup or are truly cash-strapped. Otherwise, steer clear.
What You Get
56-kbps dial-up access. The rush to broadband service has been slow to extend to free ISPs, so what you get gratis is an analog connection. However, all the free ISPs we reviewed provide 56-kbps access across most, if not all, of their networks, and they maintain a surprisingly large bank of access numbers.
Local access number... maybe. The Achilles' heel of free ISPs is the uncertainty that they will have a local (read: free) access number in your area. The larger, more established free ISPs such as NetZero and Juno have the largest network of access numbers.
An e-mail account. Every free ISP also provides you with an e-mail account, though that's not saying much considering the plethora of free e-mail services. Few services, however, let you check that account with an e-mail client application such as Outlook Express. NetZero is an exception: It automatically configures various e-mail clients, from Eudora to Outlook, to grab your NetZero e-mail.
Gregg Keizer is an Oregon-based freelance technology writer. Alan Stafford is a senior editor for PC World.
What You Don't Get
Simple setup. Free ISP installation and setup aren't as effortless as those of the slick for-fee providers. The downloads tend to be larger and longer than with the typical paid provider, due mostly to the specialized interfaces that free ISPs require to display ads. And baffling setup problems lurk, especially for the newer Web users who frequent free ISPs. We couldn't connect to NetZero, for instance, until we dug into our Dial-Up Networking folder and told the NetZero dialer to use a different modem setup.
Small-business tools. The free ISPs we surveyed don't offer free small-business Internet services, including Web hosting, e-commerce setup, and Web site design assistance.
Parts of your screen. If you hate Web page banner ads, you'll despise free services, which plaster big ad panels on your screen. You can't minimize them; some automatically return to their prominent place when you try to move them off-screen; and all of them will shut down the connection if you close the banner display window. You'll find yourself juggling the panel with other applications' windows, and even if you successfully dock it at the top or bottom, you'll surrender a good chunk of the screen.
Anonymity. Registering with a free service usually means handing over copious quantities of private information. Some providers stick to the basics--name, address, and phone number--but others, like Juno, want to know about the car you drive, the salary you make, and the publications you subscribe to.
24/7, toll-free support. Don't expect a lot of hand-holding from free ISPs. Though all provide technical support, it's usually delivered online or via e-mail. FreeInternet.com, Juno, and NetZero do offer phone support, but you pay for the call (through tolls or fees).