My recommendation for a pay account: try to find the most successful Internet Service Provider based in or close to your area, a local or regional ISP.
Your employer, or your college if you are a student, may already be providing Internet access. If so, getting a free Internet account may be just a matter of asking the right person. Some employers choose to provide Internet access employees can use from home. You may even already have the option of posting a personal or professional Web page. Ask someone in your company's IT department ("Information Technology") or your school's Computer Science or computer support department. They would then assign you a login, tell you the format for your email address, Web page address if appropriate, and perhaps supply you with starter software. Ask if they have a users' guide.
Of course, larger companies typically provide Internet access for company business only, for employee use while at work, with rules about personal use, and with no provision for employee access from home. If you're self-employed or run a small business with an Internet connection, you may well be able to provide personal access outside business hours for yourself, employees, and families, without impacting business use.
You probably will have broadband or high speed access in this situation, at least while you are at work or at school. Home or dorm access may be offered or not, and might be broadband or dialup/modem. See my Hardware & choosing a login ID page for more on broadband.
If you do have Net access at work, and depending on your company's policies, you may be able to use Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or some similar browser-based free Web-mail gateway, to set up a separate account for your personal electronic mail, that has a different email address and is completely separate from your job-related mailbox. A great many people are going this route. See my free email page for more details.
The fact that your company uses a local area network or LAN to connect employees' PCs together, doesn't necessarily mean the LAN is also connected to the Internet, although they usually are. Companies may also have what's called an intranet, in which Web servers and browsers are used to publish information inside the company network. Individual users on that company network may or may not also have general Internet access, but either way, public Internet users outside the company network cannot access information published on the internal intranet.
These included CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online (AOL) in seniority order; Prodigy no longer exists as an ISP. The original idea was to provide a pre-digested, turn-key approach to online information: a consumer product featuring ease of use.
CompuServe and a few other similar providers were the only online access available for years. CompuServe originally charged for access by the minute, and was noted for forums sponsored by hardware manufacturers, and for charging extra fees for many specific services and resources.
After AOL came on the scene in 1991, many people used it as a revolving-door introduction to going online, and then moved on to other providers. AOL even was described in print as "the Ellis Island of cyberspace." At least twice in the early days AOL rapidly added many more new subscribers than their network resources could adequately serve. In early 1994 this earned them the joke name America On Hold. Over the years I've heard a lot of complaints from people I know about their dealings with AOL, especially on billing issues. Some people ultimately find it easier to close a credit card account than to cancel the AOL service that is drawing from it.
Commercial online services became marginalized as Web services got more and more user-friendly. Starting in 1996 all ISPs pretty much had to offer flat-rate payment plans in order to compete.
CompuServe was acquired by AOL in 1997, and is still being operated as a separate service, although there is or was an option for members to have both a CompuServe account and an AOL account for a single somewhat discounted rate.
On 2 July 2006 a New York Times story (Digital Domain feature, Randall Stross) featured a blog post by Vincent Ferrari of the Bronx, which included a link to a five-minute audio file of his conversation with an uncooperative AOL representative, attempting to cancel an unused AOL account. AOL's well-known response to this situation is to do anything they can to prevent the customer from cancelling service, sometimes including tactics easily misinterpreted. This post and audio file quickly attracted enough media attention to crash its server, and Mr. Ferrari later appeared on NBC's Today show. This all occurred after AOL had already been in trouble for this sort of thing with the Federal Trade Commission in 2004 and the New York attorney general's office in 2005, including paying a $1.25 million fine in the New York case.
An ISP ("Internet Service Provider") is a business that sells direct Internet access. Instead of pre-digesting the Net and presenting you with a "turn-key" ready-to-go interface, they just connect you, and let you decide what to look at and what you want to use for client software. A monthly flat rate, for up to a hundred hours per month or so, with no connect-time charges, is typical. There are some variations: some ISPs restrict your connect time more, some charge extra for peak hours, etc. Discounts for quarterly or yearly billing versus monthly are common.
A national ISP is a company that sells such services nationwide, or internationally in some cases. Compare prices and services. National ISPs usually offer their own package of easy to use Net clients, but you should be able to mix and match, and run what you want to run. One thing you need to find out about any national provider is whether they have access numbers (sometimes called "point of presence" or "POP") in your local dialing area. If not, you may have to pay regular long distance charges from where you are to wherever their closest access number is.
Two national ISPs that have heavily advertised value-priced accounts in recent years:
NetZero got their start with advertising-supported free Internet accounts, which they still offer,* hence the name. The last time I compared, regular NetZero accounts were a dollar a month cheaper than PeoplePC.
National, regional, and local ISPs usually offer some form of broadband access, usually DSL.
A local ISP is a small business in your community, that does the same thing a national ISP does, but within your local area. This has the advantage that a local business is going to be more focused on meeting your needs, and have more time to talk with you. This doesn't mean that you won't need to educate yourself about Internet services and techniques; they don't have time to hold your hand every step of the way. But they may well have more time for you than a national provider would.
This is a very competitive business niche. You might be well advised to try to identify the biggest (in terms of subscribers) and/or the oldest such providers in your local area. The smaller ones may get "shaken out." Try findanisp.com for candidates. There's also an older Web site called The List that's supposed to list ISPs by area code. Another good way is to check the yellow pages in the local phone book. You may find the category listed as "Internet Access Providers." Or you can ask your friends.
Regional ISPs usually originate in one of two ways.
Cable TV providers pretty much all offer broadband Internet via what are called cable modems. I suppose this can be categorized as a special case of a regional ISP. They may not be competitive on price in your area.
If you're not already familiar with computer BBS systems (also called "boards") they were sort of like a cottage-industry commercial online service. They had their main popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, but there are probably still a few around. Some boards were free, others charged modest fees. Some businesses ran BBSs for their customers' convenience. Community computer users groups often ran bulletin boards, with access based on membership dues.
At a minimal level, a BBS could be just a computer, a single modem, and an extra phone line, in somebody's basement. Of course, when a BBS only had one phone line and modem, only one user could connect at a time. More popular and prosperous boards often added more lines. Usually members could send email to each other, and there would be a download area of programs and other files. Some offered other services such as games and chat.
It was pretty easy for bulletin boards to add some level of Internet access. Typically this would include being able to send and receive email to and from Internet addresses, and read and post to newsgroups. Sometimes additional services like file transfer and telnet would be available as well. If you live in a very small town, you could have one or more local boards with Internet services, even if there are no local-dial full ISPs. It's getting so it takes a pretty darn small town not to have an ISP, however.
The freenet¹ movement in the 1990's was an attempt by communities through donations and grants to provide some Internet access for people regardless of their means. The Cleveland Freenet was one of the first, but many cities and towns created freenets. Freenets typically provided text-only, terminal-style Internet access, sometimes referred to as a shell account. This type of connection is usable for email, newsgroups, ftp, and other original text-compatible Internet services, but not very suitable for Web access.²
As graphical/PPP Internet access became cheaper and more widely available—and as the number of people who knew what to do with a text-only Internet connection dwindled—freenets have either gone away or shifted their mission and focus to other community services. Some freenets still provide some type of Internet connectivity.
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