Word: dial-up
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Besides, editorialists at both the New York Times and the Washington Post tell citizens worried about media diversity and consumers worried about their pocketbooks to relax. This is a merger of cyber apples and earthbound oranges. AOL already has 20 million customers (about half the market) for the dial-up services that link computers to the Internet. Time Warner is already the world's biggest media conglomerate. Joining the two won't substantially increase either's share of its market. As the Post put it, "Down the road, there may be reasons to fear the muscle of AOL Time Warner...
...might rightly ask: How much does all this free stuff cost? In the case of PCs, some firms, like InterSquid and PeoplePC, provide quality computers that come with multiyear contracts requiring the user to sign for dial-up Internet access at somewhat pricey rates--a deal many consumers might regret when high-speed Internet access becomes widely available. AltaVista, a free Internet service provider, runs a narrow, scrolling banner across your screen that requires you to click through--interact with the ad--every hour...
...strengths of surfing via cable is that you're online 24 hours a day and don't have to disconnect every time you want to order Chinese food. But that can also be a weakness, because your IP address (the ZIP code of the Internet) doesn't change. Dial-up users like me who are still crawling along at 56K get moved to a different IP address every time we log on. We may be slower, but we're harder to find...
...sure, dial-up users get hit by Trojans too. But all the extra bandwidth provided by cable modems makes hackers salivate. If you've hooked up a microphone, the remote-access hacker can listen to your conversations in real-time. If you own one of those little monitor-top video cameras, he can watch you like Big Brother...
...having to wait for a dial tone. (The Merlin is "hot swappable," which means you don't have to reboot your machine to use it.) If I were always on the road, traveling among big cities, it would be terrific never again to have to reconfigure my laptop's dial-up connections. It's also swell to be able to sit in a boring meeting and check e-mail or browse...