Well, what is it? I’ve had constant problems with Bluelight, and America Online has earned a bad name, deserved or not, among the Teeming Millions. But what Internet Service Providers have a good appraisal from Dopers? Efficiency, use of local numbers, reasonable cost, and access to the greatest part of the Internet are my putative criteria.
Earthlink’s OK. I know, I know, some people curse its name, but it’s big, it’s everywhere, it has 800 number access (good when you are travelling), you can set it up through Windows’ Dial-up Networking (very non-instrusive) or with Apple’s Internet setup on the Mac. Tech support has been OK with me, and I like the free web space, and extra email addresses I get. I don’t have too many problems with it.
Oh, and it gets all of the Internet. I mean, I don’t know why it wouldn’t. There are no filters or anything.
I like Wide Open West cable access, which is what I have right now. But, then again, anything seems good after a couple of years of getting kicked constantly by AOL.
I use Winternet, a local ISP, for shell access and webspace, and AT&T Broadband for my gaming needs. Rationally I know I should cancel my Winternet account, but I’ve grown accustomed to having a shell account, and it’s a good emergency backup for when AT&T has problems and I just gotta get back online.
Ino, did you know that AT&T Broadband lets you have up to 60 MBs of webspace? I have one account with AT&T, but they let me have up to 6 different email addresses, each email address gets 10 MBs of space.
As to the OP, I’m plenty happy with AT&T Broadband, but it sounds like you’re looking for dial-up, right?
We used AOL for much of this last year, but frustrated by lots of sudden kick-offs and suddenly non-operating dial-up numbers and guilt at contributing to an Evil Monolith Co., we changed to Earthlink a month ago. How can it happen that someone will send me an e-mail, I will click reply and write them, send it, and have it returned as undeliverable? !? Plus if you close the window while browsing a subsection of a website you kind of have to start all over again, and we get kicked off all the time, and it spontaneously deletes drivers, and it allows more popups to come up than AOL did…so we’re going to keep shopping. We’re going to go really cheap and try NetZero, unless anyone has a horror story.