Free for All - replacing office equipment and services with free equivalents - Industry Trend or Event

Home Office Computing, May, 2000 by Amee Abel

January 22, 2000

I've signed up with NetZero, a free ISP that gives me an e-mail account I can access via Microsoft's Outlook Express. Not surprisingly, the service wants a lot of demographic information so I can be targeted with advertising. To use NetZero, I also have to download a 5MB file. The application puts a pop-up window (about 1.5 by 5 inches) onscreen the entire time I'm online.

The ZeroPort, as its creators call the ad window, includes links to a variety of sites arranged by category (search, services, shopping, auctions, and more). It's pretty handy as long as my screen resolution is set to 1,024 by 768, which gives me enough room to get the ZeroPort out of the way of my browser. At lower resolutions (800 by 600, for example), the ZeroPort is a constant irritant, like sand in my shoes.

I now have two free ISPs, three free e-mail addresses, and a toll-free number and extension at which you can leave voice messages. I'm beginning to consider dropping my paid ISP account.

January 23, 2000

Using NetZero, I have no trouble getting online. But once connected, my browser stalls. Requests for a URL return with a gripe that the site is unavailable. I disconnect, dial in to my paid ISP and have no trouble reaching the sites on which NetZero failed. Hmm ... maybe I won't drop my paid account just yet.

While most of today's free ISPs give you a dial-up connection, Broadband Digital Group has announced a free high-speed service called FreeDSL (www.freeDSL.com). Unfortunately, it won't deploy the service until later this spring. If I'm still interested then, I'll have to buy a DSL bridge--the broadband equivalent of a modem.

Time to concentrate on the telephone. I decide to try Dialpad.com (www.dialpad.com). The site features a pop-up lava applet of a telephone keypad. I can dial the number by clicking on the virtual keys, or I can simply type in the number. The first time I try to place a call (to my personal phone in the next room) it rings through and my son can hear me, but I can't hear him.

January 24, 2000

I decide to tackle the Dialpad.com problem. I find the answer on the company's technical support page and have to make some registry changes to my Windows 98 Second Edition operating system. I'm comfortable doing this, but a novice computer user might have some difficulty. After I reboot, I retry Dialpad.com, and this time I can hear and be heard. However, my computer's modem has half-duplex voice capabilities, which means it can't simultaneously listen and talk. The result is a disjointed phone conversation. Luckily, I only called my parents. My mother's evaluation of the experience? "Ma Bell has nothing to worry about."

I'm not sure I agree. Certainly, it's unusable without a modem that supports voice over IP (Internet Protocol). But the cost of a full-duplex modem is about $150 to $200. Depending on your calling pattern, that's about three months of long-distance phone calls. Dialpad.com is worth considering.

January 25, 2000

I sign up with two other phone services that are pretty cool. The first one, Fax4Free.com (www.fax4free.com) lets me send and receive faxes over the Net. This means I don't have to pay for a long-distance call to send someone a fax. However, I got hooked on iPing (www.iping.com), a hip service that lets you program the phone to make reminder calls. (In networking lingo, "ping" is a signal that is received and bounced back, like a ball hitting a wall.)