I Dream of a Genie with the High Speed Dial-Up

Joined: 18 Jul 2003 Posts: 10 Location: Athens - GA - USA

It’s 11:59 pm… The clock ticks onwards through the night as you sit at your computer, desperately waiting for the latest Half-Life 2 trailer to download. You’ve had a rough day at work. You’re exhausted, and the last thing you want to do is stay awake waiting for the damn dial-up modem to finish downloading a 180 megabyte file at 5kbps. As you lay in your bed counting sheep, you can not help but mumble to yourself - “I dream of a genie with high speed dial-up”.

The scenario described is not as rare as you might think. Although broadband has swept the nation, many people still use dialup modems today because they find it more financially convenient. In fact, cable broadband services, such as Optimum Online for example, have been becoming increasingly expensive. But worry not! There is still a way that those of us with dialup modems can still reach internet nirvana... even if it isn't quite as quick as the others. By following a few simple steps, rules, guidelines, and tweaks, you can drop a heavier ping than you might think.

The first thing you should do is get yourself a decent Internet Service Provider (ISP). Many people overlook this and get what they are most familiar with - back in the day, and still today in many place, this is said to be America Online. When AOL was first starting out it cost around $19.95 USD. Now it costs almost $22.00 USD. What many people do not realize is that the only "special" feature, so to speak, about AOL's service is the program that it comes with. Granted, despite that fact that many people might not like AOL, their program does have its own highlights. AOL dawned the commercial instant message; it revolutionized email and discussion, and created an overall interesting internet browsing experience. However, today the downsides such as the enormous resource drain by the program and system crashes in many cases are equally as noticeable. To be blunt - if you're using dialup service to play online games, you do not want to do it with AOL minimized on your system (especially a few years ago before away messages appeared in the program!). AOL Instant Messenger has gone far enough, so that Instant Messaging and Chat Rooms will not be lacking even if the AOL is. In fact, if you feel that you do not need all the excessive features of America Online, you can choose from a variety of other ISPs which will probably all be faster and cheaper.

The Faster: EarthLink and MindSpring (same company) are known for their speed and quality service. From my experience with them they were fast, helpful, and had plenty of extra features. Before EarthLink and MindSpring joined forces, they were 2 fierce competitors; they had the speed, price, and reliability it takes to make them the greatest. Both were great ISPs as well as nasty rivals, neither could overcome the other in the battle for customers, they were equals. Instead of trying to defeat its counter-part, they decided to join forces and become Earthlink. Earthlink now has double the power they had before, making them AOL's largest threat and biggest competitor, offering better speeds, more access numbers, cheaper price, and a flurry of great features. They aren't the cheapest 56k ISP out there; coming in at a not-worth-it $19.99 USD, despite the high price, they are known to be the best. From my experience with them, they seem to be the fastest, most reliable, and “tweakable” ISP’s on the market today.

The Cheaper: 3 or 4 years ago there was a huge craze about getting free dial-up, most all of the ISP's that offered this, were either scams, slow, or went out of business, leaving all of their customers out to dry with no access to the oh so great internet. The only survivor of this huge fad was the largest free dial-up provider of them all, NetZero. NetZero at first was offering free dial-up, only coming in at 28k, they were amazingly slow, but hey, it was free, what'd you expect? Juno, a free e-mail provider decided to get in on the craze, offering free 56k, but there's a catch, there was an ad-bar which was a huge resource hog. Juno and NetZero soon became the top dogs of the free ISP craze, similarly to MindSpring and Earthlink, they merged and became one company, they kept there separate names, Juno offers the email and NetZero offers the dial-up, but both support each other. Juno still provides free e-mail, but there’s an ad-bar at the top and the program seems to be quite buggy, after using Juno for many years, I switched over to Hotmail, and have stuck with it ever since. If you’re looking for a free email provider, I don’t recommend Juno. NetZero is still around but they no longer offer a free connection to the net, now you have to pay a reasonable price of $9.95. I have never tried NetZero myself, I’ve never heard anything bad about them, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard anything good about them either. I know that they offer some sort of “High-Speed Dial-Up”, which is just garbage because they’re going to charge you for what I can show you how to do in this article for free!

A newer ISP that has decided to try their luck in the game of 56k, PeoplePC, has been around for a little while. Though they disappeared abruptly at one point, they are now back again, boasting that they offer more access numbers than EarthLink and AOL. Coming in at only $10.95 it can’t hurt to try them.

If you still can not find the dialup ISP that suits your needs best, don't lose hope yet. There are still some tricks and tweaks out there to speed up any old dialup connection... yes, even if it’s AOL.