Best Dialup ISP?

C

_cashel

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 9, 2002
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I'm still stuck on dialup. Only lately, my connection has gone to complete crap. I'm on MSN now, and where I used to connect at a decent 46kbps and around there, I now connect at about 21 or 24kbps, 30's if I'm really lucky. The phonelines are somewhat new, I've tried several different computers, modems, locations (I live on a farm w/ houses and office), tweaks, etc. Nothing has helped. It looks like it's something with MSN.

What I'm wanting to do is switch ISP's. I basically want a reliable, fast ISP that isn't very expensive (like no more than the 21 or 22 a month that I'm paying for MSN). I've been looking into Netzero mainly, and a little into Earthlink. Any opinions on these? Any other suggestions period?
 
"BEST - DIAL-UP" is an oxymoron.

Dial-up sucks. They all suck. You're really limited by phoneline quality, distance to telephone company more than the hardware on the server side ever. So they should all be pretty equally sucky! Sorry to rain on your parade.
 
I really doubt Netzero is going to be faster then MSN, I've used it in the past myself. You might actually just be in a remote location where a lot of ISPs can't penetrate so they lease numbers from some local telephone company and you get "piggy-backed" to the MSN network (I can't remember exactly how it works, I used to work for an ISP and we had to do this). You can generally tell because the numbers are almost identical. Most ISPs let you try for free for awhile. Just line 'em up and test 'em.
 
OldPueblo said:
Most ISPs let you try for free for awhile. Just line 'em up and test 'em.
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Good idea, though I doubt any one ISP would be much better than the other.

Its like does dog shit taste better than cat shit.... not really they both taste like shit! LOL

Sorry, but you really need to get on the high speed bandwagon!!

You're already paying $20. Cant you swing the $40 that most charge. Its well worth it considering most high speed connections are 50-100 times faster than dial up. So 2x the price for 100x the speed. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Once you go high speed, you'll never GO BACK.
 
chrisf6969 said:
Good idea, though I doubt any one ISP would be much better than the other.

Its like does dog shit taste better than cat shit.... not really they both taste like shit! LOL

Sorry, but you really need to get on the high speed bandwagon!!

You're already paying $20. Cant you swing the $40 that most charge. Its well worth it considering most high speed connections are 50-100 times faster than dial up. So 2x the price for 100x the speed. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Once you go high speed, you'll never GO BACK.
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My guess is its not available to him based on his location. Wireless/satellite maybe Cashel?
 
dont touch earthlink with a 10 ft pole.. it SUCKS, i would rec AOL, its what i use and what i rec for ppl that cannot get broadband, dont get me wrong, at times i hate em, but they are about the best out there
 
If dsl is available in your area, sbc has an offer for 26.95 a month if you order online. I have it and it is great.
 
I have lived in two different apartment buildings where the average dial-up connection was 28k with an occasional 32k. Blame the slow speed on the internal wiring. Most apartment complexes tend to group the phone lines together for individual apartments before routing them to the main telephone trunk and the interference prevents the modem from achieving a decent speed.

You are not going to see a speed improvement unless you switch to a broadband connection. If you have no other choice but dial-up, your best bet would be to find an inexpensive provider. Don't pay $20 for a dial-up ISP. I highly recommend access4less.net at $5.95/month.

Save your pennies so you can upgrade to broadband at a later date. ;)
 
Well thanks for the input. I know that switching ISP's isn't going to give me dramatic increases in speeds, but dropping from an average connect of 45-48 to 21-24 is pretty ridiculous, so I was hoping to regain some of that.

As said earlier, there is no broadband in my area (and from my guess, there probably won't be for quite some time). I've also just gotten really irritated w/ them as well, where they'll throw me back and forth between providers when neither of them actually has service in my area. Comcast is the big winner in this. Everywhere online says that they are in my area, but call them up and ask, and they'll say no :mad: .

Thanks for the help though, I guess I'll go ahead and check out access4less.net and more into netzero and just switch into one of those. One question for Bignasty, why does earthlink suck so bad?
 
I think I'm going to go with access4less, they are by far the cheapest, and they seem to have the most access numbers as well. Rockinblue, which service did you have? The Reg. or Express? Is the Express even worth it?
 
earthlink is flaky, we had it to connect at an office and there would be days that it would dial in, connect and even show a decent connection speed but nothing would open, u couldnt ping, u couldnt open a webpage it was awful, calls to tech support said to check the phoneline, but dial in for a place i work was blazing fast and aol worked very nicely, after that we gave up and switched to direcway
 
MSN has occasionally been like that, which is another one of the reasons I'm switching. I guess I'll go ahead and stay away from them as well.
 
Qwest.net used to be great for me. I had killer pings for dial-up (140-175) and connected at 53333, but I limited it to 45333 for stability reasons. I haven't used it for close to a few years though. With my basic DSL service from Qwest I will soon get a dial-up account so I can tell you if it is as good as it used to be.
 
There are no "good" dial up ISP's anymore since the technology has gone stale since broadband came along and most dial up's aren't keeping their head ends maintained well anymore. The last good dial up ISP that existed was Mindspring but they sold to Earthlink a long time ago and got out of the game, and Earthlink sucks bigtime. I use TollfreeISP for my laptop when traveling but I think they only offer hourly rates and nothing unlimited since they're designed to have local/800 access anywhere in the world. The only other ISP I can say is decent is AT&T that I have my parents set up with and it works pretty good. If your speeds have dropped you should call the telco and have them come out and test the line, most likely theres some bad copper somewhere causing interference and making the connection fall back to the 20k speeds.
 
*twing* - even though AOL is a major noob service. They do have some of the best maintained dial up lines/servers since they still actually have a large portion of their customer base using dial-up. So I would recommend them, but they are more expensive.

I'd rather stick needles in my eyeballs than use dial-up!
 
Man dialup is so 1996.

Nowadays, everyone's on broadband, but if you need dialup, all the major ISPs here give free dialup.

Yep, free. You only need to pay your phone charges. Every bloody residential address has free dialup, whether you requested for it or not.
 
zhchua said:
Man dialup is so 1996.

Nowadays, everyone's on broadband, but if you need dialup, all the major ISPs here give free dialup.

Yep, free. You only need to pay your phone charges. Every bloody residential address has free dialup, whether you requested for it or not.
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Singapore is a step ahead there. What kind of broadband services do you guys have available for residential users?
 
i've used about every national dailup ISP, and i cen tell you, i prefer earthlink or msn.... why? cause i dont need some shitty ass software to connect, i can just use reagular old DUN.

if i were you, i'd try to do a DUN connection with your msn, and see how that goes first
 
Falls Included said:
i've used about every national dailup ISP, and i cen tell you, i prefer earthlink or msn.... why? cause i dont need some shitty ass software to connect, i can just use reagular old DUN.

if i were you, i'd try to do a DUN connection with your msn, and see how that goes first
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that's what I've been doing. I refuse to use the software that they want you to use.
 
NOT AOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok done.
 
_cashel said:
I think I'm going to go with access4less, they are by far the cheapest, and they seem to have the most access numbers as well. Rockinblue, which service did you have? The Reg. or Express? Is the Express even worth it?
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Sorry for the late reply; I've been away from the forums for a few days. I only used the regular service. Express is supposed to speed things up slightly by compressing web graphics before they are uploaded to your browser. Since I post digital pictures online, I wanted to have better quality pictures so stuck with the regular service.
 
Rockinblue said:
Sorry for the late reply; I've been away from the forums for a few days. I only used the regular service. Express is supposed to speed things up slightly by compressing web graphics before they are uploaded to your browser. Since I post digital pictures online, I wanted to have better quality pictures so stuck with the regular service.
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that's what I thought, and I really don't need that feature (msn has it too, and I don't even use it).
 
I used concentric.net for years, they are one of the lesser-known national ISPs. (I think their focus is more on commercial accounts under the XO Communications banner.) I only had a 33.6 modem but the speed seemed fine and the connection was rock solid. I think they maybe had a brief outage once a year, if that often. Customer support was also very good. :)
 
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