>Go to your local Internet provider - set up a PERSONAL Internet account
>and/or SLIP account. If it's less than $20.00/month minimum and +/- $3.00
>hour connect, I'd be surprised.
You'd be surprised then. I haven't used a lot of US access providers, but
I can tell you that last year digex were offering personal Internet
accounts in Washington DC for a flat rate of $20 per month - no usage
charges unless you wanted to use up a lot of disk.
In Sydney there are more than a dozen access providers. The local backbone
charges are _vastly_ greater than US charges, because more than half the
traffic needs to go ten thousand miles across the Pacific - but still
most of the public access providers can offer personal accounts at $50-$300
per year, depending on the level of service you want, with _no_ time
charges and often no usage charges beyond disk.
I'm not saying that cserve and aol don't provide some useful services, but
they charge like wounded buffalo for them. This is why their user populations
are steadily _decreasing_, while the Internet doubles in size every nine
months. As ever, YMMV.
Pete (who suggests that this group ought to forget about cheap pens and
Internet service providers and discuss zoomers instead ...)