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Guru @ WABC/ Channel 7
Thursdays 6:45 a.m. (New York time)
Comments and ideas: techguru@sree.net
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Sree's
Thoughts on Free ISPs
Thursday, March 29, 2001 |
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These services (try to) make their money by selling ads that run on your PC while you are online -- those annoying pop-up "banner" ads. Of course, this business model has not proved successful, so most of these services aren't very reliable. My motto: "you get what you pay for" -- so be prepared to compromise if you don't want to cough up the fees (including being limited to, say, 1.5 hours of connect time a day). Because the quality of most free services is so low, I haven't had an opportunity to recommend any. Until now. If you live in New York City, Long Island or Westchester, there's an unsually good free ISP available now called FreeNYLink, offering reliable 56k connections. Unlike other such ISPs, there's no software to download and no banner ads. It works across platforms, including PCs, Macs and Linux. It's just the cost of a call to the 212, 718, 646, 347, 516, 631 or 914 area codes. No local numbers in New Jersey yet, but they have plans to expand there as well. How can the site afford to give away the service? FreeNYLink is part of an ISP called NYLink.com and its business is offering high-speed access and other fee-based services. The idea is you will get to know and trust the company and when you are ready to upgrade to a higher-speed DSL connection, you will think of using NYLink. It's a marketing exercise for now. And it works. I wouldn't quite give up my paid ISP yet, but at least you can use it as a back-up service for now. Meanwhile, three popular free ISPs are NetZero, Juno and MetConnect -- though I would use these only if you are desperate to have free Internet access. You can see ratings and analysis of these and free ISPs at FreedomList. Resources: FreedomList's
Lists: Three
free ISPs:
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Sree's
Site of The Week As a big baseball fan, I have been anxiously awaiting the start of the major league season. And we are almost there. The best place to find various baseball links is a site called John Skilton's baseball-links.com (yes,that's a hyphen). The site says it has "the Web's most comprehensive collection of links to baseball resources." More than 8,000 links in neatly organized categories. That's up from 3,800 links when I last wrote an article mentioning the site, three years ago this week. More than 60 sites each just about the Yankees and the Mets, for example. If it's a baseball site, it's probably linked here. o o o o o o To join the LOW-volume "Sree Tips" e-mail mailing list, send your name and e-mail address to sreetips@sree.net. No more than once a month, you will receive an e-mail message with tips and tricks about new, useful and fun Web sites. |
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