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How you Choose your online Service and some reasons.
by By Ev Quinnett, LVPCUG The Bytes of Las Vegas November 2000 - January 21, 2001 at 18:50:04:
I have noticed that among those people who do e-mail and access the Internet, the service that is used the most by the majority of the people is AOL or America on line. You will find many people scorn AOL.Let’s look at the reasons for using AOL:
1) It is easy to get on this service. AOL used to send out disks and now sends out CDs with their program by the carload. You can get up to 700 hours free for one month for trying these CD’s. This makes good marketing sense.
2) Try it and you will like it, is their motto. For the novice user, its friendly screens make navigating around a breeze. You can set up as many as seven accounts so your entire family can use the same account and have their own e-mail address.
3) If you have an older computer and have not gone to Win9x, you can still use AOL. AOL is one of the few service providers that will let you use an older computer and still access the Internet. Granted there are some sites that you can’t visit, and some that come in very poorly, but still you can surf the web and get information.
4) You can access your e-mail account from anywhere and with any other service. The local phone numbers make it easy to use AOL in Pennsylvania or Nevada. This is a nice feature if you travel a lot, or have access to the Internet at work and want to check on your e-mail.
5) Getting online is easy and no busy signals anymore. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there is not a time that you can’t get online with AOL. They have a lot of phone numbers and when you dial in if there is a problem with one line it will roll over to another line, and then another until you do connected. No busy signals!
On the downside:
AOL for the most part is slow. Perhaps it’s because so many people belong and are online. I’m sure there are probably many reasons that I don’t know about as well. However, it can be quite irritating when you are trying to get something downloaded off the Internet and get disconnected due to the long time lags.
They are always trying to get you interested in buying something that they advertise. But then, a lot of the sites you visit have advertising as well so I’m not sure how much of detriment that is to AOL.
Cost, I believe AOL is about the most expensive dial up service. There are many others that have cheaper rates right on down to those who will provide service at no cost. Well, it isn’t really at no cost because you do have to put with advertising and a banner across your screen.
I know of several people who start with AOL, then decided they didn’t like all the advertising, the slowdowns, and so on and changed to another ISP, when they have learned how to navigate the Internet. Some of them stayed with other providers, but several come back to the familiar AOL fold.
With cable modem and DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines) becoming more popular, it may help the dial up services to be easier to access. The faster service once you are online is to be questioned. There will still be as many people on the Internet.
Some of these users are not doing anything but still they are connected. I needed to download a driver for a particular CD ROM the other day, none of the drivers that I had would work. I had no problem getting to the site telling me the file name of the driver and the ftp site it was on. However, when I tried to go to that site, I was refused service. A message came up stating there were all ready 300 users accessing that site and it requested that I try later. In this case, there was another site that I could download the driver from and I did so.
What do I tell people when they call asking which online service I recommend? If they are new users, I recommend they might want to use AOL for the free month and while they are using it, check out the other services and then pick the one that offers them what they are looking for. Generally it’s bundled with the other software that’s all ready on their computer
I don’t believe that there is one service that fits everyone. Each service has pluses and each one has problems of one sort or another. It’s like anything else, you need to use whatever you are the most comfortable with and that which is the easiest for you. Maybe you would like to try one of the free services. Remember they are not really free to the extent that you do have to put up with an ad banner across your screen and at times the service might not be as good as what you would like. In other words, you’ll get more frequent busy signals, and get disconnected more often. You may also be requested to do survey’s for them as well.
I have not been disconnected from AOL for a long time. Yes, I do use it. I have limited service on that ISP, but I do use it.
Another service, if you are on a tight budget, you might want to look into is AT T Worldnet. If AT&T is your long distance provider, they have come out with a $4.95 a month plan that gives you 150 hours a month. The downside again is you have this banner ad across your screen. Without the banner ad, it is $14.95 a month. I’m not sure how much advertising they have on their site.
Again, it’s a matter of choice and with what you will be comfortable. How much speed you need and what your budget will let you spend.
November 2000 LVPCUG Las Vegas
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