I think many people who have been with the same Internet Service Provider (ISP) for a long time get nervous about changing. I know it’s true of folks who use AOL (practically my whole family included). Naturally, it doesn’t apply to the readers who are übergeeks (like you), but perhaps there is something useful here.

ISP Separation Anxiety is quite understandable, especially in the case of AOL users. Once you’ve been spoon-fed, it’s hard to move into the grown-up world of the Internet, no matter how rewarding it might be. Not only is there the dire prospect of changing email addresses, there’s also the matter of getting used to different home pages, mail formats, and an entirely new user interface. That isn’t a challenge for non-geeks, it’s trial by fire.

Switching’s easier than it seems, though. For one thing, most ISPs provide relatively painless ways to notify people of address changes, have mail forwarded from the old addresses, and so forth. Another option is to move all the mail to a Webmail address ahead of time, and then just change when you feel like it (I used Gmail, of course, as regular readers know).

In the case of AOL, there’s AIM Mail, where you can use your old screen name and transfer all your email from your regular AOL account, if you don’t like big changes. Your address becomes @aim.com instead of @aol.com. In case you can’t quite stand the idea of going cold turkey, AIM.com, the headquarters for AIM Mail, offers a lot of the services that you now get from AOL. You just access them on the Web (for free) instead of having all AOL’s stuff on your own computer (for money). AOL knows it’s losing ISP customers, (see below) and is beginning to provide some services for free to keep the ad views up – usually stuff that other providers have been giving away for years.

While your email settles down, you can spend a bit of time playing around with Internet Explorer instead of your ISP’s proprietary browser. Might be a good time to download Firefox and mess with it some, too. You’ll be amazed at all the choices you can make for yourself, once you’re not surrounded with other people’s to confuse you.

When you’re comfortable, there’s really not much left to do except make the switch. Allow some overlap to change the email over, and keep an eye out for all those subscriptions you might want to change. (Lucky you! All the others won’t know where to find you anymore!)

BTW… why do sites that sell broadband service have such data-heavy Web pages? Haven’t they figured out that most of their customers arrive with dialup connections? 😉

I just installed BellSouth’s “FastAccess DSL Extreme 6.0” after Earthlink messed up my billing for the fifth time in slightly over a year. The BellSouth service kicks butt. It’s more than twice as fast as Earthlink was, for three bucks a month less. One testing site showed it about 5% below T1 speeds at my desk – not at the curb. The others were a bit lower, but not much. If you’re close to the fiber lines on good copper, true high-speed DSL (as opposed to what some providers call high-speed) can be blazingly fast.

Installation was a whiz. The CD talks you through, if you’re not comfortable winging it. If you’re located in the BellSouth service area, you could do worse. Cable can be faster (although not always, and not much), but around here they want as much for basic cable as I’m paying BellSouth. It took me a while to figure out how to get rid of all the unnecessary bells and whistles that came with the installation, but all in all it was a pretty pleasant experience except for the part under the desk – and that’s my fault for getting old.

This is not a paid announcement, and it’s quite possible that next month I’ll be bitching about BellSouth, but right now, it’s da bomb.

If you’re buying “resold” broadband (AOL, Earthlink, or some company nobody ever heard of outside of your home town), find out who the primary provider is in your area (the guys your company buys from) and see what their prices are like. The likelihood is that you will be able to get a greater variety of service – and probably at better prices – than you’re getting from the reseller. The primaries are required by law to sell broadband services for resale, and they don’t like it a bit. They’ll do whatever they can to steal customers from their customers, including restricting bandwidth and providing their own service for lower prices, and you can probably benefit from it.

BellSouth, as an example, offers four levels of DSL service, from $24.95 to $46.95/mo.* Its resellers only handle (to my knowledge) the middle two, and jack the prices up about 25% over what BSo charges for the same speeds. The same applies to many other providers, both DSL and cable. Since the modem controls the bandwidth, it’s no trouble at all to restrict what’s available at a given location – or to open the spigot wider. Check it out.

*Florida prices

[tags]aim,aol,dsl,isp,bill webb,broadband,bellsouth,changing email[/tags]