Are You Still Using Dial Up?
By Terry Stockdale for TerrysComputerTips.com
If you’re still using dialup Internet access for use from home, you should start thinking about “broadband”.
What’s broadband? That’s the term for getting your Internet access via a cable or DSL connection, or even a fiber-optic connection, if that’s available to you.
During the roll-out stage of cable and DSL Internet access, there weren’t too many choices. If only one was available in your neighborhood, that’s the one you could get.
For some of us, that’s still the case. Although I live in a relatively large city (Baton Rouge), my area of Baton Rouge does not have DSL access available. The phone company’s equipment servicing my subdivision is not compatible with DSL. Unfortunately, just a few years before the DSL rollout started, the latest-and-greatest phone switching equipment was released — and it turned out to be incompatible with DSL.
In today’s broadband world, most cable and most DSL providers have 2 to 4 service options. Basically, they’ve got a cheap option that is a lot faster that dialup, but still throttled significantly.
Then, a couple higher-priced options with higher downstream and upstream speeds, and then the highest priced option. They also vary the additional features, such as the number of email addresses and the size of the mailboxes.
This post is excerpted with the permission of Terry’s Computer Tips.
