The Best Broadband ISPs in America

Dial-Up: R.I.P.

Ah, dial-up, the rotary phone of Internet access. It's painfully slow--a woeful 56 kbps--but it's also cheap and still surprisingly popular, with more than 34 million people still using it in the United States, according to research firm IDC. (That's down from more than 42 million last year, though.) PeoplePC, EarthLink's value dial-up division, has 1.4 million dial-up subscribers, many of whom pay only $11 a month. "Dial-up customers are more task-based. They tend to spend less time surfing," says Hilary Jensen, PeoplePC vice president of product management. In our survey, people who use the PeoplePC service rated it lower than EarthLink subscribers did.

Still, dial-up is doomed. Only 13 percent of our survey respondents use dial-up to access the Internet. Analysts predict that the number of dial-up users will dwindle to less than 12 million by 2009, while the number of broadband users will grow to more than 70 million. Even dial-up dinosaur AOL is in the process of evolving into an ad-based Internet portal, à la Google and Yahoo, and will soon offer much of its formerly proprietary content for free. And it's not trying to garner new dial-up accounts.

Kevin Lund, an AOL user "since it pretty much started," ditched dial-up years ago, though he still runs the AOL client software on his AT&T Yahoo broadband connection. Why? Lund, who manages inventory control for Fry's Electronics stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, likes AOL's security features, content selection, and parental controls. He has been paying AOL only $9 a month, but AOL's new strategy means he soon won't have to pay that fee anymore.

"The AOL software has some pretty good proprietary software for child protection. And since I have a couple kids at home, I can lock down their computers pretty tightly as to where they go," Lund says. Among our survey respondents, more AOL users said they use parental controls than subscribers to any other service, and a much higher percentage of AOL users said they were "extremely satisfied" with its parental controls.

Of course, you don't have to settle for dial-up anymore. Broadband rules--and it's getting faster all the time.