101 Ways to Hook Up to the Internet

By now everyone has heard of the wonders of the Internet. The media barrages us with daily articles about the Internet's incredible size, skyrocketing growth, and utter trendiness. All the cool people have email addresses and flaunt them. For the most part, however, enthusiasts ignore the challenges faced by ordinary people who try to use the Net. To most folks, the riches of this glamorous information superhighway lurk right around the corner, tantalizing but out of reach. There are several paths to Internet connectivity all based on your position in the world. If you happen to work at a high-tech company or a well connected corporation, then you will already be hooked up the Net. If you happen to be a student at almost any college or university, the school can give you direct access to the Internet via an "e-mail account." If you're still not included in the above, then welcome to the real world, you have lots of company.

The vast majority of the public has to negotiate their own pathway to the Internet. Luckily there are still two more ways of hooking up. First is your local Internet-access provider, examples of which include netcom.com, slip.net, fish.net, and sprint.net. These dedicated Internet-access providers offer full Internet access with blazing speed and usually lower prices than the next alternative. The second option, an on-line service, is often the easiest and most popular route for novice users. A large number of users first connect through an on-line service and when they feel more comfortable with the Internet, graduate to a dedicated Internet-access provider. On-line services include America Online, CompuServ, Prodigy, Delphi, eWorld, GEnie, ECHO, WELL, Woman's Wire, and the upcoming Microsoft Network. These services offer local access numbers throughout the country, reasonable rates, and varying levels of Internet. Currently no on-line service offers full Internet access; Delphi comes closest offering email, Usenet, FTP, telnet, gopher, IRC, and gopher-based World-Wide Web (WWW). However Delphi has the reputation of being hardest to use since it's completely text based. America Online (AOL) is the fastest growing on-line provider and is estimated to reach 2,500,000 users by the summer of 1995 (Gunn Jan. 1995). AOL has one of the easiest user interfaces around and currently AOL offers email, Usenet, Gopher, and WAIS searches with plans of introducing a graphical WWW browser in the future.

As on afterthought, I didn't manage to cover 101 ways to hook up to the Internet (also note the title was not "Hook Up ON the Internet"), but these are the major methods of gaining Intenet access. There are countless numbers of local Internet gateway providers and a good percentage of net users connect from such services. Also most local providers charge much less than national on-line services which is the main reason that once uses have become familiar with the offerings of the Intenet and Usenet, they tend to move from a service like AOL to a local provider. New users flock to AOL or CompuServ because they are so easy set up and within ten minutes of installing the software you're guaranteed to be surfing the cool waves of the Infobahn. Once users get their feet wet in the indoor heated pool, they often feel confident enough to migrate to a local gateway provider where things often aren't as easy to use. In effect, national on-line services tend to function as training grounds where the novice surfers go for swimming lessons and once they learn the breast-stroke, they move on to bigger and better things. Of course, you always have people who never venture past the shallow end.