Cheap Dial-Ups Thriving
from the stop-paying-too-much-for-your-dialup dept
Who needs AOL? As people are ditching AOL in droves, not everyone is going to high-speed DSL or cable modems. Plenty of people are apparently realizing that for less than half the price of AOL, they can just sign up for a discount ISP. Of course, not everyone is happy with them - saying that the service levels suck, and they get bombarded with ads (I guess you get what you pay for). Personally, I have a cheap ISP that is great - but I only use it when my home connection goes down (too frequently) or I'm traveling and don't have access to broadband.
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A long time ago...
It had pretty serious limitations on webspace and e-mail storage (around 1 or 2 MB as I recall) and the news server was less than exceptional as well, but for $5 you could pretty much stay online all the time.
Amazingly enough, even though he had plenty of customers, the math worked against him and it turned out that you can't afford to give away internet access for only $5 per month no matter how many customers you have, unless all of your customers are 80+ year old grandparents who want to log in once per week and check their e-mail.
I got in early and didn't have too many problems, but after 10 months of service, he had to shut down. Being the good Christian that he is, he actually refunded people for the pre-paid service they never received, probably out of his own pocket.
My suspicion is that he thought this would be a good way to get a T1 or T3 line ran to his home (yeah, he ran the business out of a spare bedroom) and get other people to help pay for it.
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