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Cost and Ease of Access

After performance, our poll respondents who use national ISPs rated cost the second most important feature of a service. Interestingly, local and regional ISP users list cost as their biggest concern, even though they pay more on average than they would for a national provider.

Most ISPs we reviewed cost $20 to $22 per month for personal Internet access. The cheapest, JunoWeb, charges just $10 a month. Juno also offers free access, but the paid service gets you free support, priority access, and additional dial-up nodes. Bear in mind, many ISPs charge less if you pay for six months' or a year's worth of service in advance. Ameritech's annual prepaid plan, for instance, comes out to less than $18 per month.

The monthly charge isn't all you may have to pay, though. Some services levy start-up charges, ranging from $15 at several regionals we surveyed to a relatively steep $25 at EarthLink (though you can avoid EarthLink's charge by signing up online). Three ISPs--Bell Atlantic, GTE, and AT&T WorldNet--ding you a buck for each hour that you stay online past their limit of 150 hours per month.

Last year, only a third of the ISPs we reviewed allowed multiple e-mail accounts at no extra charge; such accounts are a blessing for families and small businesses. Today, two-thirds do. AOL and CompuServe lead the charge by permitting seven addresses each, while AT&T is not far behind with six. A half dozen ISPs, meanwhile, continue to offer a single e-mail account at the base price and make you pay for additional ones.

If you're looking for a guide to Internet content as well as a connection to it, check your ISP candidates for features such as customizable home pages and ready-to-use Web guides or directories. Two-thirds of our reviewed ISPs provide personal start pages. Of course, you can always set up with a Web portal (for example, Excite or Yahoo) to do the same thing.

Busy Signal Blues

If you frequently can't log on because of constant busy signals, or if you have to connect via a long-distance number, your ISP is as useful as a knife in soup. Our survey respondents agree: They voted log-on success and a local access number as their third and fourth most important ISP assets (after speed and price). Not surprisingly, a local number scored as the second most crucial characteristic for users of local ISPs.

"I could live with the slow speed of my [former] ISP," says Craig Becker, a petroleum geologist who lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, "but anytime you wanted to log on, it would take 30 tries." Needless to say, he's switched providers.

To stress-test our 15 ISPs, Visual Networks dialed each one at least 3525 times at all times of the day and all over the country to tally log-on success, then broke out the resulting figures into business and evening hours.

AT&T WorldNet, BellSouth, and CompuServe earned the only Outstanding ratings in log-on efficiency, each achieving a success rate of 98 percent or better. AOL ranked as Poor; but MSN, Pacific Bell, and Southwestern Bell received the lowest grade: Unacceptable. The failure rate of calls was more than eight times higher to MSN than to AT&T. Based on Visual Networks' tests, you have about a one-in-ten chance of not getting logged on to MSN each time you dial. "One of our access providers suffered a national outage [during the months we tested]," offered an MSN spokesperson as explanation for the high call failure rate. The outage subsequently prompted MSN to switch to another provider.

For the most part, the results of our survey of real-world users mirror Visual Networks' conclusions. AOL users, for instance, are the least happy with their log-on and connection experience, while those who connect to AT&T WorldNet are among the top five most satisfied.