Suggestions: searching for a new ISP

[cavingjan]

I'm currently looking for a new ISP and need some suggestions. Due to my business travels, I've kept AOL for years. I recently bought a 3com 56K LAN modem for my network at home and need a new ISP. I thought I found one (dts-net) but I'm having so many problems with getting connections. It seems like someone is hyjacking my username and password or else their system gets too many users and it can't process me. This happens mostly in the late evening hours. I can get online anytime before that. Go figure. They don't have the best tech support and I couldn't connect at all when I was out in Phoenix. A month of connecting and paying by the hour (remember those days? All because I prematurely dropped my AOL back to bring your own access) with AOL has definitely left a sour taste in my mouth for dts-net.
I need to be able to connect with a PPP connection without any proprietory software. I know that mindspring will not support this router (friend of mine already had this problem). I'd like it to be nationwide and under $15 a month. Any suggestions? I can't get broadband until sometime next year. Maybe if I'm lucky.
Thanks a bunch.

 

[cavingjan]

Nobody uses dial up anymore? :frown:

 

[Spoooon]

A friend of mine had just been using one of those free ISPs. I don't think that would be a good suggestion for you though. I've used AOL basically since 1.0. I remember the whole pay by the hour crap. I also remember when you couldn't do anything else if you were downloading a file. I've never really had problems with AOL when I was on dialup. My brother had tried out Mindspring, and had no problems, but that doesn't really help you either.

Heh, beyond that I can't think of any good dial-ups. Maybe when this gets bumped, someone will have some good suggestions.

 

[reitz]

I've used both Earthlink (now owns Mindspring) and Prodigy, and both were excellent. I know that if you pay a year in advance for Prodigy, you can get it pretty cheap.

I'm just curious, what kind of error message do you receive when you try to log on?

 

[noxipoo]

should the isp's tech support resolve your problem? most do a decent job

 

[cavingjan]

To say these people have good tech support would be saying that Cyrix makes the best and fastest processors. I should've known better but .. well you get the idea. I got an email from them originally stating my account id and password. That didn't work. I followed that up with the address that issued the info, their techsupport email account, phone call (which goes imediately to an answering machine), and an email to the administrator for the whole domain. In that order over a couple of days. It wasn't until I made a complaint on their webpage that I even got any replies. The admin promptly emailed me back and after issuing a new id and password, I finally got on a day later. But once evening rolled around again, same problem. I emailed back and he stated that it must be a network problem on their end and they'd look into it. I left for three weeks and did not get any replies back from anyone about the problem. I did try to log into their numbers in Arizona but ran into the same problems as before. (I'll post the windows log in error when I get a chance to look at it again) I came home and I haven't been able to get online since I've been back. Their ability to get me connected is very weak. My router is spitting out the error message that I should check the telephone number, username or password and try again. (I think the windows error was number 591) So I dropping them and kicking myself for wasting 2 months worth of fees on them.
Do you have to use Earthlink's software to connect or can you just use window's DUN? Thanks a bunch.

 

[cavingjan]

Thanks for the ideas from everybody. I went with Earthlink. Little more $$ but I shouldn't have any headaches with them. They gave me a moth trial to see if it works with the router. Free month beats that free cheap camera. It appears to be working well.