ISP

Shopping for an Internet Service Provider

You could say that shopping the net for an internet service provider is similar to shopping for a new car.  Most of the features available from each provider are pretty much the same, you just ahve to price shop.  They all offer email, dialup access for TCP/IP, etc.   Some offer space for a personal web page.  The one thing that you need to watch out for is their user to modem ratio, one fact I am sure most will be reluctant to share with you.  I am sure we all remember the America On Line...or as some called it back then American on Wait...stories of continuous busy signals.  Busy signals from your ISP are one of the most frustrating thing a web surfer can encounter.  Maybe the ole error 404 -this page not found- runs a close second.

And then there's pricing.  Most are competitively priced for the same services.  When you add ISDN to the mix, then things start to change a bit.

I started out my internet experience with IBM.  I loved IBM's service and would still like to be with them today had they not gotten their pricing out of line when I switched to ISDN.  I have since changed providers at least twice.

When I set up my account with IBM's internet service I was the typical consumer.  I was dialing in with a 28.8 analog modem.  I later moved up to 56k while it was still in its infancy, during the days of no satndard for 56k modems.  IBM didn't offer personal web space, but that was no big deal to me at the time.  The thing that IBM offered that was attractive was the account included 5 email addresses.  This was perfect.  There are four of us in the family, so I could easily assign everyone their own personal mailbox and they could pop their own mail at their leisure without it interfering with anyone else's mailbox.

Then I had the opportunity to go for the big pipe.  I had tried earlier in my computing days to install ISDN in our home, but BellSouth said I was too far from their central office.  I then noticed some telephone construction in our area, so I waited a while and gave the phone company another opportunity to increase my phone bill.  ISDN was now available, so naturally, I went for it.  You may have noticed by now that I want the latest and greatest, as an example, I downloaded IE5 on the first day of its release.

I gathered all of the equipment I would need for my ISDN account -- I chose the 3Com Office Connect LAN Modem, because it offered everything in one package, modem, router, dchp.   It essentially was a router and firewall.  The office connect uses the 192.168.1.1 address block of private internet addresses. 

The next step was to determine whether IBM offered a local dialup ISDN connection in my town.  Being Big Blue, of course they did.  Then came the bad news.  It appears they really don't want to have many dialup ISDN customers when they decided to charge a $7 per channel hour surcharge on top of their normal monthly rate.   I was being forced away from Big Blue.

I then began a search of ISP's in my local area, comparing services and pricing.  It looked like the best deal was going to be GTE.  Their offer was unlimited dual channel (128k) access for one rate.  Their rate was reasonable and in line with what other ISP's were charging for ISDN, so I made the switch.

GTE offered 5 megs for personal web space, but the one draw back was they only included one email account. They offered more mailboxes at an additional monthly cost. That sent the family out looking for free web email accounts (they chose USA.net which offers you the ability to pop your messages with any email package).

As my luck would have, not long after I jumped on the GTE train, they decided to make some changes.  They changed from unlimited access to 100 channel hours per month.  I didn't change my surfing habits and started to monitor my monthly usage and the 100 channel hours per month was not a problem.

The one change the new GTE service forced me to do was to change the timeout on my router.  Since I was now in the digital world my connections were almost instantaneous.  I was no longer having to dance to the analong pinging and ponging music of two modem handshaking for 15-20 seconds.  I set my timeout to 3 minutes of inactivity to converse on-line time.

Things were going great and then.  I bet you knew that was coming.   I started noticing that I wasn't connecting and you guessed it, I was encountering busy signals.  I tried to live with this for several months, contacting the GTE help desk who said they were noticing that my pop was unusually busy.  The techie I spoke with on at least one occasion admitted they needed to an equipment upgrade, but it didn't appear it was in my future.  I tried to live with this situation for a few months, hoping they would improve their local equipment and the busy signal problem would go away.   It only got worse.  Attempting to connect during the evening prime time hours was a frustrating experience.  I was being forced away.

So I began searching around for another provider.  I was looking for one that separated analog and digital dialup services.  I looked at everyone.   It was when I looked at UUNET that I discovered that UNET was actually providing the service for GTE in my area.  I asked GTE about this and yep, I was correct.

This eliminated UUNET as a possibility.  They were showing the same phone number as an ISDN dialup number that I was experiencing busy signal with already.   No need to chase them.

I then seriously was considering AT&T WorldNet.  The big bell offered one of the things I liked about IBM...additional mailboxes for my account at no additional cost.  I think they were including 5 mail boxes with each account.

It was time to research AT&T's local dialup phone number for some unscientific testing.  I was going to attempt to dial their system during the peak evening hours from a plain old telephone to see what the busy signal situation would be like.  Found their local dialup number and to my amazement it was the same telephone number that GTE and UUNET were using.  There was no use to go there.  I knew what the answer would be.  BUSY SIGNALS.

When I was considering switching again, I spoke to my friend Bob Thompson (ttgnet.com).  He had been using our local telephone company (BellSouth) for some time and was very happy.  He had not experienced the busy signal frustration I was encountering with GTE, so yep, I soon became a BellSouth.Net customer.

The one drawback was that BellSouth did not offer dual channel ISDN in my area, but I could easily give that up to be able to connect when I wanted to.  I made the switch and have been very pleased with the baby bell to date.  I haven't noticed any difficulties at getting on the net other than problems upline. No busy signals.   I hope my writing this doesn't jinx me!

The switch to BellSouth coincided with my decision to bring up this web site.  After a little research on web hosts I decided to go with Pair.Com.  They're big (lots of servers), have a big pipe to the net and have been a good partner as of today.  If you're looking for hand holding customer service, then Pair is probably not the host for you.  They're great technically, but are a bit lacking if you want to converse with a human.  They have no telephone support, but offer private newsgroups where help and answers are plentiful.

At pair I was able to set up email addresses for the rest of the family by including them in my autoforward file..   If mail comes in addressed to someone@wakeolda.com, it's immediately forwarded to the correct email account.  In my case, it's to my pair mail account.  In the case of the kids or my wife, to their web email account.  It's working great until pair decides to include some additional email boxes at no additional cost, which I hear may be in the not too distant future.

If you are considering a switch in ISP's, PC Magazine offers a review of ISP's in their April 20, 1999 issue and gave the AT&T WorldNet service their editor's choice award.  Before switching to any ISP, I would try to find out their local dial number and run the unscientific busy signal test I spoke of earlier.

To help with a search for a new ISP, PC Magazine also offered these links that may help you make your decision with confidence: