Best Dial-up internet

[Joelacrane]

Yeah, I know you all think im crazy! I am a senior in high school, and i live in the country. Theres no DSL, no Cable, no clearwire, and my parents are too cheap to get satellite, so we are stuck with dialup on a second phone line.

Right now we've got Netzero, and it is terrible. I can't use windows to dial in, and the dialer program has ADVERTISMENTS. It is also very, very buggy.

I have my dialup shared across my wireless network via Internet Connection Sharing. I often use Remote Desktop to log into my gateway computer to get the internet dialed back in. Thats why i want someone that allows me to just use windows. Then, whenever something on the network requests internet access, windows can just dial in automatically.

Plus the netzero dial is driving me insane. I can rarely get it to work at all anymore.

So who provides the best dialup? Or are there any other options avalible? ISDN? 3g?

[Brad Adrian]

I'm not sounding glib, but the "best" one may depend upon which ones have toll-free access numbers for your area. If you live in the country, it's worth making sure that whatever providers you consider have either a local number or toll-free phone number for your exact area. Don't assume that a number that has the same prefix as a nearby town is truly local or toll-free unless your ISP or phone company can verify that.

That said, the "big names" among ISPs (AOL, Earthlink, etc.)offer the greatest likelihood of having a local number for you.

[Mark Kenepp]

What Brad said, except my personal opinion is to stay away from AOL. I also would say stay away from NetZero (In fact, I think that I would take AOL over NetZero).

My Service provider is Earthlink and I have been extremely happy with them over the years. They are accessible through standard PPP connections which means that I can even dial up to them with my old Psion Series 5!

Any ISP that allows standard PPP connections would be my recommendation. Stay away from any ISP that uses proprietary connection protocols (like AOL) or some special means of authentication (like NetZero). My rule, if an ISP needs additional software to work it is not worth connecting to.

Regarding you enquiry about alternatives to dial-up, ISDN is an outdated technology, I believe, and I don't recall everything I once new. Like standard dial-up, it does require a specific dial-up number so you would run the same issue as dial-up for finding a local number. I also don't think that you would find ISDN noticeably faster than standard Dial-up so if there is much of an increase in price, then I would say that it would not be worth it.

[Joelacrane]

We had earthlink for a long time, but it was getting to be pretty unreliable, so we switched to netzero, which has been a little better as far as speed and connection quality, but the dialing program is driving me nuts

For both netzero and earthlink. the numbers are in a city 30 miles away. There just isnt anything closer. Its not long distance, but it makes for a terrible connection.

[Brad Adrian]

Another thing to consider is whether intricate scripting is used when dialing. If the service DOES require scripting, you might be hard-pressed to ever dial up using your Pocket PC (which generally doesn't support dialing scripting). Way back when we had Earthlink, it worked well with my Pocket PC, but I have heard lots of complaints about its reliability lately.

[Joelacrane]

Is there any way to see if netzero uses an scripting and then copy it all out and make a new dialup connection using it?

[Joelacrane]

Got it! I found a little Java program that you enter your username and password into. It then gives you an encrypted username and password. I created a new dialup connection using the new username and passsword and it works great!

It now dials in automatically, and i can even tell Internet Connection Sharing to connect from any computer on the network.

It seems to be stuck at 14.4kbps though. I wonder why?

[Brad Adrian]

It seems to be stuck at 14.4kbps though. I wonder why?
I don't know much at all about your ISP, but there could be lots of reasons for not getting a faster connection, not the least of which could be your remote location. BUT, make sure that your dial-up settings are correct; you can usually select the highest connection speed and let the system connect at the highest available/possible speed.

Make sense?

[Joelacrane]

It was set at 57000 bps so i changed it up to 921600 bps, but it still connects at 14.4Kbps. Last night I got 16.2kbps out of it. Maybe i need to call the phone company to get them to send a little more power up our line?