I have been thrown off by this ISP three times in the past twenty minutes.
I even click on their stoopid ad bar (which is required on most of these) and it still happens.
And the stoooopid ads are for crap I don’t want or need, like another credit card. I didn’t want that credit card ten minutes ago. I don’t want it now. But the lack of variety and forced clicking skew any market research possibilities.
BlueLight even showed an ad for itself. I clicked it to see why they would try to get me to use a product I had to use to see the ad. They tried to sell me yet another credit card. And they aren’t even a bank; they’re K-Mart!
Whenever I close a window of Internet Explorer it crashes all of the windows of iexplorer and often takes down my desktop. Especially when I use one particular ISP. Sometimes there is a leftover crash, so iexplorer goes illegal on me when I log in.
When I ask a tech support question they send me links to their ultra-stoooooopid FAQs, which neither answer my questions nor those of any person who has successfully reached the FAQ page.
I have used Sprint, Alta Vista, Netzero, and BlueLight. Whether I pay for the honor directly or indirectly by my clicks there are about the same number of ads, the same technical problems, and the same miserable service. I’m pretty sick of it.
Since I have no intention of paying for crap, has anybody had better luck than I have? Should I try using Netscape to get away from some of the snags? Will that just screw up my system more?
I’m using Freewwweb. http://www.freewwweb.com
I can generally stay connected all day, just leave it on.
Get 50K connection speeds, although things do slow down at popular times of day.
No banner ads, works like any other dial-up ISP connection which is why I’m using it (works under Linux).
5 dialups in my area.
The catch? All you need to do is set your homepage to be their very useful portal.
Most areas have a reasonable selection of fee based ISP’s and I would guess yours does as well. Not all are perfect but you can generally find at least one or two with capacity and connection quality that’s as good as the technology will allow.
With respect to pitching a fit about the connection quality of “free” ISP’s and how they’re not delivering value for… what…the grace of your eyeball presence? Doesn’t it strike you as just a wee bit absurd to be bitching about a “free service”.
The simple answer to your question is that they “suck” because they are usually stretching their hardware resources across more users than free based ISP’s based on a non-access fee, ad based business model that has yet to pan out.
There is a new breed of discount ISP in many areas that offers standard web access and an email account with NO support hand holding or news groups for $6-$9 per month. This might be your best solution if one exists in your area.
It runs at 51K and you do not have to click on any ads. The ad bar is at the very top, and is only 1 inch wide. And if you know how you can hide the ad bar. I never get any busy signals or disconnects. It comes with Microsoft Explorer and free E-mail. It’s as good or better than any service I paid for in the past.
EXCEPT:
On Sunday afternoon it runs so slow I want to smash my fist into my monitor out of anger!!!
If you can tolerate that, try it. I’ve gone back to watching sports on sunday instead of surfing the web.
Yeah, that’s my point. I got just as bad service with a paying account as I do with the “free” ones. And as anybody who watches pledge time on PBS knows, you pay for “free” TV – and ISPs – by tolerating advertising. Like NBC, they aren’t losing any money on me.
That’s the odd thing though. Freewwweb doesn’t really advertise. Their portal is snap.com which a lot of people sign up for just as a portal. I have no idea if they’ll stay in business, but I intend to take advantage of it as long as they’re still around…
Quite simply you get what you pay for. Free and many bargain fee ISP’s blow chunks.
Go with a real ISP and drop $19.95/month for the privledge. I support people with this stuff all the time and my personal opinion of some of the best are Mindspring, Earthlink and UUNet. There are certainly others out there but these guys are good and nationwide. You can also almost always get tech support quickly and they are actually helpful (all too rare these days).
Remember, just because you get a 50K connection speed doesn’t mean you’re getting the best performance out there. All that means is the line from your house/office to the ISP is clean and the ISP’s modem agreed with your modem that they can reliably communicate at this speed. After that if the ISP has a measly (for an ISP) T1 line out the back door and 200 people are online you’ll still get crap speed. The ISP’s listed above maintain HUGE nationwide pipelines. UUNet just installed OC192 lines in New York, Washington and Chicago. That’s 10 GIGABITS per second!
Your choice but I think most of these guys have a free month tryout. Give 'em a shot and see how it goes.
Maybe its your modem since it happens with so many ISPs. Its probably some unsupported offbrand type. My ISP has a seperate number just for USR modems cause they are the best.
Here I am again, putting in another plug for Juno. Yeah, I know, we get weird disconnects all the time, and they have a limited number of access numbers, so you might not be able to get it where you live (although the $8.95 a month Premium option is supposed to have more access numbers, plus 24/7 tech support), and the new ad banner slows everything way down (but you can tell IE Internet Tool Options not to show pictures or play videos, which helps).
But hey, I tell myself, “you get what you pay for.” I’m sitting here with free Internet, and I’m happy.
P.S. Make sure you have all orphan files and DLLs off your hard drive before you switch over–Juno’s temperamental at the best of times, but if you ask Juno and the IE5 version that comes with it to share space with fragments of bluelight.com or yahoo or AOL, it goes totally ballistic, runs around holding its head and screaming, “I can’t handle it, I can’t handle it!” and absolutely gonzo things happen to your desktop, and it keeps rebooting itself…
In this case is it really ‘free’. How much is your time worth? How much is a low stress level worth to you?
My company bills me out at $150/hour. If I have to dick around for one hour making a flaky product work it’s worth 7 months of pay access at $20/month to my clients (given that we have a two hour minimum it’s on the order of 1.5 years). If I have to re-build a system that’s bombed then it takes about 2-3 hours (give or take depending on the system). That doesn’t take into account lost time on the clients part and what that may cost them.
If you’re like my parents who use the internet maybe for 2 hours a month to get e-mail then this may be fine. If you’re like me (and I assume many of the people who use this board) and are online 50 hours+/month maybe something that is less of a hassle is in order. In the long run it may be cheaper than a free service.
Personally, I use two ISPs. FreeNetName gave me my own domain name so long as I log in every now and then. Cable London is £10/month so long as you spend £10 on non-internet calls as well, and I can get 50.6k regularly with them. Plus, as a national network, if I ever have a problem with one of the POP numbers I can dial in to any of their UK-based POPs at no extra cost.
I’m sure this information is no use to most readers, but hey, I’m bored, unemployed and surfing for no good reason.
When I was living in Ohio, I had SSSnet, a local ISP…never a busy signal, never a disconnect, and 50k connects always. No slowdown either. $14.99 a month. Great ISP. You’d probably be able to find a nice, reliable ISP in your area. Now I have ADSL service from Telergy in New York state, and it’s great…blazing fast, and, since it’s ADSL, always connected. And it’s only $35 a month. Just look at local stuff and you should be able to find something…it’s not free, but how many things are free AND really good. Not many.
I suppose the added overhead of the ad bar leaves Windows 98 teetering even farther out over the brink than it is anyway.
Sprint uses Earthlink, so that’s no solution. My daughter uses Juno on the same computer, so having all that crap, plus my own four ISPs, probably isn’t helping. But if any one of them had worked in the first place I wouldn’t have had to try so many!