This is only relevant to UK Web Surfers.
In recent months a rash of Free ISPs have appeared. For how long, or how many will survive, is unknown, but it is worth trying them as they are FREE.
How do they do it for free? By having sponsored advertising, getting a small percentage of your phone call costs from your phone service, as a portal to other sites that market their products over the internet. Anyway to us the user all that matters is whether we like the service they provide, if we can connect when we want to, can we put up with the adverts, does the connection get dropped often etc.
I will tell you of the free ISPs that I know of, those that are available on a local rate number and what you need to get connected. I hope that you will try them and then share your experience with this site so that we all can have some idea of what these free ISPs are like. Let me know of any others that you know of.
Sign upon line:
www.freenet.co.uk
www.free-online.co.uk
www.bigwig.net
www.x-stream.co.uk
www.gofree.co.uk
www.thefree.net
Dabsol.co.uk info at dabs.com I think the signup is at http://signup.dabsol.co.uk
www.connectfree.co.uk
Signup by phone :-
www.iax.net Phone 0800 0520523
Signup using a CD
www.freeserve.co.uk CD from Dixons PC World
www.softnetfree.co.uk CD from Software Warehouse
www.virgin.net order CD online
My observations to date. Freeserve customises your IE4 and Outlook Express but has good info on it�s site on how to remove it Softnet does a customisation of explorer and IE4 window bar that may irritate you, if it does, I can put the info on this site, if you let me know. X-stream makes it�s own IE4 setup which I DON�T like but this is only when you use the x-stream icon and doesn�t effect IE4 otherwise, it�s system wouldn�t work properly on my test computer as it failed to open sites from the button menu. Gofree does an automatic setup after you have signed up. As far as I remember none of the others do anything to your setups, some just give you the info to set up the connection for yourself. It is a good idea to have more than one ISP. I was downloading a file at .9kbs (900bs) and changed to another ISP and downloaded at 3.1kbs. It�s not always the download site that is the problem!
Don�t forget to contact me to let me know of your good and bad experiences of Free Internet and I will include a page to share them with all visitors.