Dial-Up ISPs

Although dial-up connections are currently the majority, they are becoming increasingly less used as cable modem and DSL access make it into homes. Dial-up connections are modem-based and max out at 56Kbps speeds. They are much slower than broadband connections.

You can still find a few ISPs that provide free dial-up connections (although the number of them has significantly decreased in the past year). Free dial-up providers make money by forcing you to view ads and doing such things as selling your personal information to marketing companies. (One of the most well-known was NetZero, but it now charges for access.) Dial-up accounts come with free Web hosting and disk space (although both cable modems and DSL have this feature also in some cases).

Dial-up connections are available just about everywhere in the U.S. Even if you don't have a local ISP, you can contact one of the major telephone companies, such as AT&T, and sign up with them. They probably will have a local connection number for you to dial in to. For home users who travel a lot and need a local number to call to avoid long-distance charges, a national provider is a good choice.

Most dial-up connections offer unlimited connection for $10–$20 a month. The most poplar service is America Online. The maximum speed of basic dial-up service is around 56Kbps. Setup is generally very simple—much easier than DSL and cable setup—with little or no setup fee involved. All you need is a modem attached to your computer.

Limitations

The limitations that we all face with dial-up lines are the connectivity speeds. You are lucky if you get a full 56Kbps. If you are a road warrior, you know that most hotel dial-up connectivity ranges from about 14Kbps to 50Kbps. A number of firewall products can cause connectivity problems with dial-up lines and affect your connection to the Internet. With the multimedia content of the Internet, dial-up connections are becoming increasingly more limiting. If you want to listen to music over the Internet, view videos, or watch the latest movie trailer, a high-speed connection is almost a requirement. Most Web sites are so graphics-intensive that slow dial-up connections make Web surfing a long and slow process. Downloading the latest AOL update or the latest release of a Web browser can take hours on a dial-up connection but take only minutes on a broadband connection.