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Getting involved with a caring Internet service provider can lead to a wonderful relationship. For example, Amy Hurka-Owen of Mebane, North Carolina, loves her local Internet service provider, Intrex.net. She loves the way its support personnel jump to help her solve a problem, and she loves the fact that she's never gotten a busy signal.

That hasn't stopped Hurka-Owen, who teaches at nearby Elon College, from thinking about dropping that ISP like a stone. "I've been trying Road Runner this month," she says of Time Warner's cable modem-based Internet service, "and I don't think I can bear to go back to my local provider. Cable is so much faster. With Web pages now so graphical, I think we'll all be forced to go to higher speed and faster connections."

The only stumbling block to her switch is the price: more than double what she pays the local ISP she loves so much. But even though the higher cost may stretch her family's budget, Hurka-Owen can't get over the faster downloads and the way Web pages snap into place. "It's just a speed issue," she says, explaining why she's on the verge of switching.

Hurka-Owen has plenty of company. Millions of Web users are hungry for faster Internet speed, more reliable service, and better support. With the ISP picture mutating faster than a politician's positions in November, now's the time to see if you've got the right connections.

Many Ports in a Storm

The ISP business is huge. According to Boardwatch,a publication that covers the ISP market, more than 7400 Internet service providers now compete for consumer and small-business customers. But the big daddy remains America Online. With membership estimated at 21.4 million by Internet analyst firm Jupiter Communications, AOL dwarfs every other ISP.

Not that others don't dream of challenging AOL's preeminence. EarthLink and MindSpring merged earlier this year, and long-distance telephone carrier Sprint Communications subsequently bought a quarter of the combined company. In June, SBC Communications, parent company of Ameritech, Pacific Bell, and Southwestern Bell, agreed to combine its consumer and small-business Internet operations with Prodigy Internet. The following month, national provider GTE and regional provider Bell Atlantic merged and renamed the result Verizon Online. (Both groups still offer slightly different services depending on where you live, so we've continued to list them separately in our chart.)

Meanwhile, cable providers like AT&T Cable and Time Warner frantically wire homes for the Web as well as for TV, and regional telephone companies and large ISPs push Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) access. EarthLink says it will have 150,000 DSL customers by the end of the year, out of its 3.7 million customers.

Then there's the joker of all ISP jokers: free Internet service providers. Led by NetZero, which claims a whopping 2 million active users, the free Web access services have made a big splash. "The free services are going for AOL subscribers, and those of other service providers," says Zia Daniell Wigder, a senior analyst at Jupiter Communications. "It's much cheaper to get someone [as a member who is] already online."

Innovative partnerships between ISPs and unrelated businesses mark another major shift in the Internet services market. These "affinity groups," as Wigder calls them, offer free or cheap Internet service as a way of promoting their brands. Some alliances, such as the one between brick-and-mortar retailer Kmart and online powerhouse Yahoo, result in free services like BlueLight.com; others, like the deals struck by AOL with Sears, Target, and Wal-Mart, are merely partnerships in which the retailers try to recruit customers for AOL in exchange for a bounty. Other outlets provide cobranded free access, ranging from the unexpected (the Democratic Party and online brokerage Ameritrade) to the downright wacky (The Simpsons and Seventeen magazine).

These partnerships enable companies to reach the not-yet-online users, but the strategy has also convinced some long-time Net heads to switch to free access--or to keep it as a backup to their paid provider. "There's simply no reason to pay for full access," Wigder says. Our survey respondents, however, don't agree: They see plenty of reasons, from download performance to support, to pay for access.

In our exclusive survey of 2053 PC World subscribers who were personally involved in selecting an ISP (see "Surveying the ISP Landscape"), we uncovered additional trends. Local ISP use, participants report, is falling fast. Eighteen months ago, when we last reviewed consumer ISPs, nearly half of the respondents said they connected through a local provider. Today, fewer than 25 percent subscribe to a local service. More than half connect via a national provider, and 16 percent use a regional ISP.

Pay or free, fast or slow, busy signals or a clear line--you still have a ton of choices. With high-quality Web access available in most parts of the country, there's no reason to compromise, and it's easy to shop around. To help you, we've examined 15 major providers: the nine top national ISPs and six major regional providers. Unfortunately, we can't cover local ISPs due to their relatively low number of subscribers and scattered locations.

We assessed these 15 ISPs from three angles. To get a feel for real-world speed and reliability, we contracted with Visual Networks of Rockville, Maryland, for ISP performance testing. We polled more than 2000 PCWorld.com visitors about their satisfaction with their own ISPs, including our 15 and nearly 500 local providers. And we talked with dozens of users personally, to dig into the whys and what-fors of their ISP choices, experiences, and expectations.