A year ago I signed on with Hawk Communications at a monthly rate of
6.95 prepaid X12 for this past year. The service was fine and when the company was sold to Earthlink a few months later they told me they would honor the prepayment deal until it expires. That will come about at the end of January. After that they will start billing me 9.95 monthly. Now with DSL and broadband competing with each other and so prolific it would seem that dial up services should be able to be had at bargain rates. Does anyone know of any deals similar to the Hawk one I picked up last year? Thanks, Lenny Stein
Am I wrong in thinking that you're somewhere in Eastern Canada? Can't remember what, but some post sometime gave me that idea. If wrong, I apologize.
If not, I'd suggest that you check out 295.ca - never used them, but had a friend who did or does. $2.95 per month for unlimited dialup, a discount if you paid a year in advance.
The key will be if they have a local dialup number in your area.
I have to wonder if it's any cheaper to provide dialup than broadband anymore, dialup ties up the circuit and associated switching gear while it's in use, broadband is transparent. As broadband becomes more common the dialup equipment will be more archaic and likely more expensive to source and maintain.
I've been happy with Galaxy dialup at $12/month in Massachusetts but I don't know if they serve New Hampshire. The only downside is lack of a newsgroup feed, which I get separately from Newsguy.com at $40/year.
Source what? As the number of dialup customers drops off, some equipment won't be repaired. It will be replaced with working spare equipment that is no longer needed, where available.
In a decade the custom chipsets will probably be unavailable to repair the existing equipment, anyway. Who knows? By then they may have finally achieved fiber to home, and no one in the US will have to worry about dialup?
But for those of us who don't need the speed and don't want to pay a lot of money what are the options? Its bad enough we're going to be getting HDTV crammed up our asses whether we want it or not, why this? Proogress? Bullshit its all about money. Lenny Stein
On the other hand, broadband rates have been coming down, while Dialup keeps creeping upwards. Some providers are selling Broadband at a discount, based on the monthly bandwidth requirement. Its a good bet that it won't be long before there is little or no price advantage for dialup the casual residential. After all, its a lot easier to build and maintain a broadband backbone where they assign you an IP address and forget about it, till you have a problem, instead of maintaining a dialup network as well. When I first got broadband in 2000 it was $70 per month. It had 2 Mb/s download rate, a 2 MB mailbox for each of four user accounts. Today, its $45 a month for a 5 Mb/s download limit, eight user accounts with 10 MB web space and a 100 MB mailbox per user. I am currently using three of the user accounts for personal use, and one for my "Computers for Veterans" program. It has its own e-mail address and website to keep people in my area informed on what is going on, along with some Veteran's news. I am scheduled to speak to the Marion County Veterans Council next month about taking the website to paid web space so we can expand the veteran's information section.
In closing, I think that the Internet is still in the model "T" stage. It will grow and change as it matures, like any other technology.
I pay $29.95 for broadband, that's exactly what I was paying for dialup when I first got on the internet 10 years ago. One thing I can say about it though is once you have it you'll never go back. Just the convenience of being online instantly without waiting to connect and not tying up the phone is worth it, never having to worry about someone else picking up the phone and interrupting a 2 hour download when it's 99.5% done, and basic stuff like downloading patches, drivers and other software is an order of magnitude less painful. Oh and you can plug in as many computers as you want and have them all online at once, great for anyone with a home network.
Well thats all well and good if you have cable to begin with but we still use an antenna for TV. I know some may argue that we may be living in the dark ages here but I have no desire to have cable. And just to set the record straught when my son and his girlfriend were living here they installed a high speed cable networked system throughout the house which we all used. That all went with them when they left and really I don't miss it. For what we do dialup is more than adaquate. Also cost is a factor for us too so that was the reason for my exploring the least costly method of getting connected in the first place. Lenny Stein.
I don't have cable either, used to years ago but found I never watched TV anymore once I had broadband so got rid of it. My broadband is DSL over the normal phone line, it's a bit more limited as to where you can get it though since you have to be within a certain distance to the central office.
You don't have to subscribe to cable to get broadband where I live, and I have a choice of Road Runner, Earthlink or AOL for the same price. If you want dial up, look in your phone book for a small local provider, or do a Google search for ISPs in your area. Not all of them advertise, and a lot of them rent backbone from the same companies so you might end up with an ISP in another part of the country. I tried the locals, and gave up on them, and switched to Earthlink dialup, and then after a year off line I went back to broadband, with Earthlink. Its always online, and I only need the one phone line.
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