by David
Allen Russell
 A friend of mine suggested Earthlink when I first hooked up
to the net many years back so I went with them and I must say
that I was very satisfied with the service. My only complaint
was that if I had a problem and needed to call them I had to go
to their automated phone answering system and wade through all
their instructions before I could get an actual person to talk
to, and very often I would get a recording that said something
like, "all our representatives are busy at the moment
please stay on the line. You're approximate waiting time will be…(pause)..
18 minutes" I learned quickly that I had better go to the
bathroom before making that call, because if the urge should get
to me before their representative did and I had to hang up, I
would have another 18 minutes to wait, or more, when I called
back.
Well anyway, my wife and I like to take long drives
sometimes, and one of those times we found a very nice house at
a very nice price in Lake Elsinore California and decided to
move out there. The place is about 20 miles east of the ocean
from San Juan Capistrano, and it has all the things I love--very
little traffic, peace and quiet, boating, fishing, sky diving,
golf, bike paths, horseback riding, and great restaurants. What
it doesn't have is a lot of local dial up numbers for Internet
Service Providers, so I stayed with Earthlink and paid for long
distance hoping they'd get one. Unfortunately they never did,
and that cost me a bundle the first couple of months.
Well, I looked around and discovered a small local company
only a few blocks from our new house so I signed up with them.
It was great, because if I had any problem at all I could just
ride my bike over there, go in the office and talk to the guys
who ran it in person, and they were always instructive and
helpful. I even got to pick a web address and email address that
I liked better. Unfortunately, after a year or so I started
seeing ads on TV and on radio that DSL was the big thing, and it
turned out to be bad for my local company because they started
losing their customers in a market that was already small. At
the same time the cost of their telephone lines and maintaining
their service skyrocketed. Unhappily they had to dumb down from
five servers around the areas of Lake Elsinore, Murrieta,
Perris, Sun City, and Wildormar, to only three, and get rid of
some of those expensive phone lines in order to cut expenses and
stay in business. That was when I started having real problems
with the service. After enjoying great service for a couple of
years, I suddenly started having trouble getting on line, and
getting cut off right in the middle of downloads or uploads.
This seemed to get even worse when the school bus stopped at the
corner near my house and all the kids started coming home.
Well, considering the fact that my business was suffering,
and my income depends on it, I could not afford my mail being
interrupted or being cut off in the middle something, and
although I hated abandoning my good friends, survival does come
first, so I started looking around for a new ISP. It was then
that I got a real shock. DSL is not available in my area, and
the only other ISP's that have local numbers were having the
same problems. Anyway, one day I was in the local K-Mart store
and saw a sign saying that they were offering a free ISP so I
decided to try it. I figured that this would carry me over until
I could get DSL or some other comparable service. Of course I
already had Email on yahoo and a web site at geocities and could
access from any ISP from anywhere in the world, so I felt that I
could afford to experiment.
So, I took their disc and installed it, and sure enough they
did provide a couple of local dial up numbers, an Email address,
and it was all free. The only thing they wanted was to put their
ads up on my site, and I figured I could deal with that with no
problem. Well, that worked fine for about a month, and then they
informed me that the local numbers were no longer available and
offered me a selection of other numbers that were in the general
area, but were actually toll calls. At this point I was
wondering if bait and switch was their standard procedure and if
perhaps they might be getting a cut on the phone bills for
signing up new customers. The paranoid and suspicious side of me
began to arise. Anyway, I needed to keep it until I could get
something else, so I kept using Bluelight, but started looking
around for some alternative.
ATT advertises one so I got their disc. They say they offer
it for $4.95 a month but after reading the fine print I decided
that I didn't want it. Basically it says that they can raise the
rate anytime for any reason without prior notice. I imagine they
could raise it to anything, and let you know after you have
already run up a monster phone bill. No thanks. Anyway, they
didn't have a local number so that was crossed off my list. I
checked into a couple of others and found that when you read the
fine print, you put yourself in a position to get hooked into a
corner where you can get screwed royally. Always read the fine
print, is my advice. Finally I went to Iwon.com and typed in
free ISP and it gave me a big long list. After checking a few of
them out I finally chose Excite.com. It was an easy download.
All I had to do was click on their icon and it did all the rest.
Their program looked good, and they offered me a local toll
free number. Coincidentally, it was the very same number that
Bluelight had given me originally that they said was no longer
available. The bait and switch game came to my mind again,
but I installed excite on my desktop anyway and kept the
bluelight as a back up. I was able to set it up so that I could
still get Email at Bluelight but that it would be automatically
sent to excite where I could access them by using a local dial
up number. But guess what? After about thirty days I got a
message from excite saying they were no longer using that number
and I would have to select from a new list, all of which were
not local.
Now I was beginning to get the picture. Keeping that in mind
I went back to Bluelight and started a new account using another
name. Guess what? They gave me that same toll free local number
again. Well, as it happened my wife's company wanted her to do
some work at home and offered to give her AOL and pay for it, so
now I have both Bluelight and excite on my computer, and can
access both by going on AOL using our local toll free number, or
I have the choice of having it all forwarded to any number I
choose to forward it to. Now, I am able to keep all of my other
addresses, can access them anytime, and it costs me absolutely
nothing. How can you get a better deal than that?
 David Allen Russell
hagensmith2OOO@yahoo.com
ustudyabroad@aol.com
www.allenpublishing.com
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