Internet Access

For those of you in the UK thinking of going abroad and looking for a dial up service whilst you're out there, Free UK ISP has been busy compiling a directory of recommended international ISPs. So if you are heading abroad and looking for a quality dial up ISP look no further!

Labels: dial up, international, ISP

Anyone who's tried knows that using your mobile or PDA for mobile internet access can be painfully slow, but Netfury will be offering a subscription service to speed this up too! The service is officially "coming soon", but those who register early will get a £5.00 discount.

Everything will just be getting faster in March 2007!

The fastest and smartest internet compression tool for dial up internet will soon be arriving in the UK. Users of dialup know that the speed of their connection can be infuriating compared to broadband, however lots of people use dialup either because broadband is not available, or it doesn’t suit their circumstances. The arrival of Netfury means that you can have access at a speed comparable to broadband. And the best bit is you can keep your existing dialup ISP!

Netfury Accelerator delivers text and graphics more efficiently by using a variety of proprietary compression technologies that significantly reduce the size of Web pages and page elements sent to your browser. Compression is the main mechanism for accelerating first time page visits. Netfury also provides intelligent caching. This means that after you have visited a web page once, at subsequent visits it will load about five times faster than it would than if you were using dialup without Netfury.

Netfury also provides advanced protection against annoying pop-up windows and annoying 'in page' advertisements.

Netfury will be available for £25.00 per year and will be launching in the UK in March 2007. Watch this space for future updates!

Virus's can seriously damage your machine and spyware can slow it down and waste disk space (as well as being quite cheeky by spying on your online activity). However many people simply don't bother installing antivirus or antispy/adware programs, in fact I must admit to not doing this until about a year ago, and then pulling out my hair when malware kept re-adding itself to my registry. However, most people expect to have to pay to avoid viruses. Lots of subsciption ISP's place great emphasis on the antivirus and anti-SPAM services they offer, but is the same level of service provided by free ISP's?

Definately - yes. Many free ISP's will provide you with free anti-virus and anti spam protection, after all it is in their interests to protect their servers. Users still need to provide their own anti-virus software and any spy/adware protection software they want. This is the same for subscription ISP's, you are not getting any extra added anti-virus benefits for your own computer. Users need to be proactive and take steps to protect themselves. Many great products are freely availible on the internet for users to download. UK Internet Access has a complementary free Antivirus filter already enabled and offers a free SPAM blocker for it's POP3 email accounts. Many free ISP's charge for these services, so it is worth investigating when you are selecting an ISP. As for protecting your computer whilst using the internet Free Internet Access recommend AVG Free anti virus software. Personally I also use Spybot Search and Destroy, which is also totally free and will keep a check on malicious programs attempting to install themselves .

For more information about computer security check out the bbc website.

Everyone and their dog seems to have an email account nowadays, whether it's from your ISP, work or a web based account email is one of the most useful things to come out of the internet. The only trouble with it is... technology has moved faster than our ability to create rules for this new medium. Everyone who emails probably knows someone who’s got themselves into major trouble with it, particularly at work. My favourite story is of a girl who started at a new company, was told her email would be monitored for three months but still used her work account to sign up for an escort agency (complete with sexy photos), much to everyone’s amusement (except hers when she was sacked).

Still you don't have to be blatantly stupid to let email get you into hot water. As there is no universally accepted email "etiquette", what you write can often be misinterpreted or be unintentionally offensive. As there is no universally accepted email "etiquette", what you write can often be misinterpreted or be unintentionally offensive. If you want to make sure you don’t get it wrong, have a look at this email guide.

Before you start offending all and sundry, you need to get yourself an email account sorted out. There is an endless choice of email providers and you can get anything you want as an address with a bit of searching. After the age of thirteen, however, the option of having, 'iamthegreatestpokemonmasterintheword@somethingequallyridiculous.com' is not the main deciding factor when picking your email provider. You need something which is easy to access, you are able to pick up through MS Outlook or Pegasus or whatever email programme takes your fancy (a.k.a POP3 email), and gives you the option of having a few addresses for different purposes. Free UK ISP offers all this as part of it's free internet access service, which we think is pretty cool. Whichever provider you choose, just remember your email p and q's!

Following on from my earlier post, it seems that many people are put off dial up as they think it’s synonymous with a slow connection, but having a dial up internet connection no longer means sacrificing speed. Netfury compression tools have developed a service which dramatically increases the speed of a broadband connection and 12Free ISP have teamed up with Netfury to provide what is probably the fasted dial up ISP in the UK, up to five times faster than ordinary dial up.

Physically changing the speed of your internet connection is impossible, and the sceptical amongst you are probably wondering how this works. Well…Netfury uses a technology called Content Sensitive Compression ('CSC') to individually compress each element of a web page or email content using various compression algorithms based on a nine Patent approved proprietary technology (please don’t ask me to explain that any further! Read more about Netfury.)

Interested? Check it out for yourself!

Many people are unsure just what exactly an ISP is, or of the different ways in which they can obtain internet access. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is a business or organisation that provides access to the internet. As well as providing access to the internet users rely on ISP’s for domain name registering, and email. At the dawn of the internet ISP's were ran by telephone companies, but now anyone who has the skills to do so can start their own ISP, which means much more choice (and perhaps confusion!) for the consumer.

ISP’s provide different ways of accessing the internet, from slower dial up services to faster broadband connections. Both have their merits although as online media more popular broadband is increasingly favoured. However dial up ISP are preferred by many loyal users and can be accessed from any landline in the world.

Generally an ISP charges a monthly fee to a customer, dependant upon the speed of the service, and other extras offered, although free ISP services are available. Check out Which ISP? for a list of free providers.

It's been a long time since this blog was updated so new contibuters Jamie Clouting and Emily Pattinson have been assigned to make sure new content is added, for all its readers.

Check back soon to see what we've been saying!!

Well, we've expanded. VirtuAffinity has bought a prime piece of Web real estate. An ISP Directory

A thorough and detailed list of Free ISPs worldwide. If it's not in there, get it added