With the emergence of free Internet access, who needs the pay for access anymore? While it seems as if the free ISP world has gotten much better in the past few months (by bringing a few strong ones forward, and leaving others bankrupt), it's still far from perfect. Whether it's putting up with banners the entire time, filling out surveys every month, or lousy connections, most free ISPs have a long way to go until they are popularly accepted. With that in mind, I took five separate providers for a spin, and her's what I came up with.

Altavista Out of business: As one of the first search engines to support free Internet access for the Mac, this program is very good. Altavista provides a ton of access numbers for most of the cities it serves. Unfortunately, once you dial, you have to wait forever, as their connection process takes forever. The connection speeds tend to be quite fast, offsetting the extremely long sign on time. In any case, this is a very good back-up ISP.

Excite FreeLane No longer has Mac support: Excite jumped on the free ISP bandwagon just after Altavista. Because They both use the same service (1st-up), most everything is the same about them. The major difference being ads, and what starting page you are directed to when connecting.

What a normal 1stup banner bar looks like (not actual size)

Lycos Out of business: Lycos is pretty much exactly the same as FreeLane. I guess the main difference between picking any one of these over another is which search engine you prefer. Otherwise, they are nearly identical.

Simpsons Internet Access Out of business: While the Simpsons Free Access also uses 1st-up, I just had to include it. What Simpsons lover would be complete without a Simpsons free ISP? This way, you can go to an intriguing Simpsons page when you connect instead of some lousy search engine.

BlueLight.com Stupid new 25 hours/month rule.: BlueLight.com has a partnership with K-mart and Yahoo, that should keep it afloat for years to come. While they provide fewer access numbers, the connections are surprisingly fast, the connecting time is twice as fast as the 1st-up places', and the banner is less obtrusive. To top it all off, the ad bar takes up about half the RAM as the 1st-up places, making BlueLight.com my most highly recommended Free ISP.

DialFree.net Out of business: While I myself did not try this out, I though I would include it to round out the selection. DialFree is different in that not only do you have to fill out a survey every month, you also have to pay a $10 Fee. I have heard good things about these services, but I don't like how they tell you it's free, then charge you. That's bad business practice to me.

NetZero: While NetZero has yet to support the Mac (they say Mac support is coming soon), I had to include it due to the fact that Freei.net has gone down. Freei.net recently filed for bankruptcy, and referred all of it's users to NetZero. Luckily, NetZero is one of the largest Free ISP services out there, so they hopefully shouldn't go down anytime soon.

While these services differ somewhat from one another, they all offer the same thing, free Internet access. I have found that most of them work about the same, so it's really just a matter of personal preference. No matter which Free ISP you choose, you'll definitely be happy to be saving over $200 a year.