The Rules are Changing
If you're like many of the people for whom the Internet has increasingly been a part of daily life, you've probably noticed that there are an enormous number of new options in everything from email and web browsers to high-speed Internet access. In this article, I'll take a look at some of the new options and what they can do for you.
One Email Address
If you've ever changed your telephone number, you know what a hassle it is to have to give everyone a new number. If you haven't yet gone down that road with a change of email addresses, lucky you. For those who don't plan on making a permanent commitment to a single Internet Service Provider, a free email account might be the best choice. Microsoft's HotMail (www.hotmail.com) is probably the best known of these services, but it's by no means the only option.
As you'll see if you take a look at the enormous list of web-based email services at http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_web.htm, this is a booming area. It makes sense -- web-based email means that you can access your mail from virtually anywhere there is a web browser.
There are limitations to what you get from most free services, of course. In HotMail, for example, you are restricted in the size of the attachments (enclosed documents such as spreadsheets, pictures, etc.) you can receive, and there's always a little promotional pitch for HotMail attached to the bottom of your messages. However, not all services share these "features" - check the above-mentioned list for user comments and feature comparisons.
But what if you want Internet access from multiple locations? Here, too, the pressures of the marketplace have produced a wonderful variety of low-cost solutions. If you need multi-point access around the world, you might consider a multinational service such as America Online, CompuServe (now owned by AOL) or MSN. With CompuServe, for example, you can dial local access numbers in virtually any major city in North America or over 700 points of presence around the world, and tap into the Internet from your portable PC -- or, if you are gadget-happy, one of the growing number of handheld devices providing dial-up internet access options.
There are, however, several reasons why many people hate AOL, not the least of which is the fact that AOL forces you to use its dialer, meaning you can't do simple dial-up networking sharing or auto-dialing. The dialer software is full of advertisements, too.
In my tests, access to CompuServe or AOL was rarely thwarted by busy signals or network interruptions. In fact, I maintained a "secondary account" for emergency access to the net using CompuServe until recently - a decision I hope I won't regret. I now rely exclusively on the dial-up access provided as a bonus feature of my high-speed connection.
Faster Access
And what was the name of this hussy for whom I dumped my faithful dial-up connection? ADSL, an acronym for "asynchronous digital subscriber line" technology. Yep. High-speed Internet access swept me off my feet and I'm still swooning. ADSL is a service available from phone companies in a growing number of metropolitan areas, and it offers speeds typically around 100 times the performance of a 28.8 bits-per-second modem (I get around 2.5 Mbps) - and, if you're lucky enough to be close to the ADSL access "switching station," and your service provider doesn't "cap" the service at a lower rate, you might see even higher speeds. This is because ADSL speeds decrease the farther away from the "switch" your home of office is.
ADSL performance differs for other reasons, too, in various parts of Canada and the U.S - and not all of them are technology related. Some of them are marketing decisions and some of them might contain a dash of politics, too. In British Columbia, for example, Telus' ADSL service can yield speeds of up to 4Mbits per second, but the company arbitrarily scales it to 2.5Mbps or 1.5Mbps for Professional and Home service users, respectively. But even before the company put bandwidth caps on its services, users seldom saw the full 4Mbps speeds. In our tests of an "unbridled" ADSL link, we saw a connection about half a kilometer from the phone company's switching station produce transfer rates no higher than 2.7Mbits/sec.
In other parts of Canada, lobby groups are noisier, and the phone companies are more frugal with their bandwidth, offering what Western bit-hogs sneeringly call "ADSL lite," which delivers about 1Mbit/sec. There isn't room here to discuss all the subtleties of how ADSL works; suffice it to say that it is known as "Asynchronous" for good reason: it offers greater performance when downloading than it does when uploading. See the ADSL articles in this section for further details.
By the way, in case you are unfamiliar with what a megabit means in terms of download performance, a megabit is one-eighth of a megabyte. Therefore, a service claiming one megabit per second should end up delivering about 125 Kilobytes per second - not too shabby, if you're used to a 56K modem's 5 K per second! (An Apple Technical Information Library document describes a formula you can use to calculate data transfer rates.) ADSL service is about $50-$60/month in most areas.
Another increasingly popular option is a cable modem (about 30-$40/month in most areas). As with ADSL, a cable modem requires your computer to have an Ethernet card (sometimes provided by the cable company). Although cable companies used to demand that you also had basic cable TV service, a growing number of regional cable Internet access providers now provide an Internet access only option for about $10 over the basic monthly cable "modem" service fee. (Technically, it isn't actually a modem, by the way - another topic discussed elsewhere in this section.)
So, what if you want to share a single high-speed (or low-speed, if you're a masochist!) Internet connection among multiple computers? There are a number of solutions to this on the market; Microsoft Windows 98 SE/Me, Windows 2000/XP and Mac OS X all have extremely simple ways to set up a shared Internet connection. In Windows, this feature is called Internet Connection Sharing, or ICS. With this feature, you are able to share an internet connection -- at the cost of not being able to use the built-in firewall in Windows XP. Once the computer set as the 'server' and connected to the internet, any computer on an internal LAN may use that machine's connection to browse the internet. No setup is required whatsoever on the client machines, making it possible to mix machines running Windows, the Mac OS, Linux, etc.
Mac OS X has a better Internet sharing setup system, allowing the host machine's IP address to be something other than the 192.168.0.1 address Windows forces you to use (without complicated manual configuration or third-party software.)
It is possible to increase Internet connection speeds in Windows 98 SE and newer Windows releases by "ganging up" more than one modem -- in essence aggregating the combined bandwidth from more than one simultaneous Internet connection. This is, of course, an awkward solution, as you'll need two phone lines, two modems, and two Internet Service Provider accounts to achieve double the speed. However, for computer users in rural areas where Cable modems and ADSL connections are not available, it may be the most viable choice -- at least until globally available wireless or satellite-based Internet connections become ubiquitous.
For Further Reading:
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