Adam wrote:
Hi everybody! Your opinions wanted here...
... for a quality ISP with inexpensive unlimited local dialup access,
for my parents. Do any of you know anyone who's using dialup locally
and is either happy or unhappy with their ISP? This is the kind of
thing where it's easy to get a list of ISPs, but I'd really appreciate
anybody's first-hand (or second-hand) experience on their quality.
BestWeb dialup was fine at first, but it got to the point where it was
disconnecting them about every five minutes. They switched to NetZero
which has the advantage of being cheap ($10/month unlimited), but
NetZero requires their own customized browser, and the Windows version
is impossibly buggy and I couldn't even get their Linux version to dial.
I see you've already had the experience with BestWeb. I think their
problem was that they had some highly-experienced folks set up the
original ISP, then those people left the company & were replaced with
barely capable and/or shor-timer staff. who let the system decay, and
when they tried to expand the system, they had no clue of what they were
doing.
The problem is, despite what Joe was suggesting, sometimes broadband is
not an option at home. DSL or Fios may not be available due to your
location, and cable can be a grossly expensive option, *especially* if
you are not subscribing to cable TV.
Unfortunately, the options for dial-up are dwindling faster than
broadband can replace it, and sometimes your only choice is to run
Windows or MacOS in order to connect to anything, since the remaining
dial-up options simply will not work with Linux at all. Probably the
best option is to see if your phone company has dial-up, which gives you
the option to move to DSL later without having to chang your accounts.
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