AltaVista Offers Free Internet Access
Dateline: 8/10/99
Update 12/10/00: Altavista will no longer be offering free Internet access because 1stUp, the company that Altavista contracted with for the service has exited from the free ISP business.
It's tough enough to make money offering Internet access at $20 a month, but now another potentially big player has entered the field offering access for free. The AltaVista Internet portal has launched their own nationally available free Internet access service, FreeAccess, which is still in the beta test phase.
NetZero (see review) was the first to offer a totally free and widely available Internet service in November of 1998. They have rapidly built their user base with over 1.2 million registered users of which over 600,000 actively use the service. Even with those numbers they are still far from earning a profit.
Can AltaVista enter the market now and hope to make a profit? I'm not going to make a prediction either way, but they do have several factors going for them. The AltaVista search and portal service is already a high traffic site so they will be able to leverage that to rapidly build a user base. The software download is very small and the registration process is very easy and very quick.
So far the service seems to work well but there are a few minor glitches in the software. I have found that when you close the ad window, or MicroPortal as AltaVista calls it, it does not fully unload itself from memory. This will prevent you from logging in again until you reboot or use the Windows task manager to remove it. The MicroPortal also seems to respond very slowly to mouse clicks. I'm sure that since the software is still in beta that these things will be worked out.
The one major problem I see for AltaVista at this time is they don't offer an email account with the service. People have become accustomed to having a standard POP3 mail account with their ISP. NetZero has offered this from the beginning and I would say this gives them a definite edge.
If you wish to sign up for the service and give it a try you can do so by visiting the FreeAccess page. Even if you already use NetZero or intend to stay with your regular ISP you may want to give them a try. It never hurts to have an alternate way to access the Internet. AltaVista's service may also be a great way to introduce the Net to your friends who don't have Internet access yet. The small size of the downloaded software means you can save a copy on diskette and give it to them.
Who knows, perhaps one day none of us will be paying for our basic Internet access.