Free Internet Access
Is it really worth it?

By Eric Georgieff
November 10, 1999

In the days when the internet was just beginning, all services were costly.  If you wanted more then one e-mail address from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) you had to shell out the big bucks, while if you wanted to have a web site you were talking about a sum that only the biggest company's could possibly afford.  Then arrived free e-mail services such as hotmail (see our August Web based E-mail comparison), as well as company's that offered to host your web site at no charge, such as Geocities and Tripod.  Many people profited from these now free services, however until only recently you still had to pay for a connection to the internet, whether it be through a regular phone line or a cable/ADSL line.

Welcome to the world of free internet access.   A number of company's, such as Altavista, Zeronet and 3Web have started to offer this crucial service, that every web surfer needs, at no charge.   What we may be forgetting though is that the two other types of free services mentionned earlier, e-mail and web hosting, require you to look at ads in order to pay for the service.

Unfortunatly, free internet access is no different, and this time around it's even worse.  I signed up for the only free internet service currently available in the Toronto area, 3Web, to see what this phenomenon is all about.  I can tell you right now that I was quite disappointed.  Although the connection was very quick (up to 56K access), and you get a real (POP 3) e-mail address, the ads simply took up too much of my small screen.  With only three quarters of my viewing area left over after the ads, and the navigation buttons on my browser as well as the Windows taskbar, I had only a few inches of area to see the web page I was trying to read.   Furthermore, the ads are frightingly personal.  One of them, a dating service ad, used my name in the animated banner.  They also make sound (luckily this can be turned off), which can be extremely annoying when you are trying to concentrate on something.

Take it from me, it is definitely worth paying 10 to 20$ a month for unobscured, good service and fast internet.  Only time will tell if free internet will suceed.  Yet looking at how other free internet services have fared, I'm willing to bet it will.  In the end it's up to your patience with the commercial world in which we live.