After looking at high-speed alternatives, I decided to go with Suddenlink. We already had Suddenlink TV cable so the introductory price for Internet service was only $19.95/mo, the same as Always-Online's dial-up service (but will go to $24.95 after six months). That's not bad for 20 times the speed increase. At Always-Online I connected at about 50 kilobits/sec but with Suddenlink's service I download data at 1.1 megabits/sec consistently as clocked by http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/. Upload speed, of course, is always much less. The main reason I chose Suddenlink is they offered up to 70 megaBytes of webpage storage, while their competitor Embarq offered no webpage hosting.

Converting to Suddenlink was painless. If my PC had been located near a TV cable jack the only one-time charge would have been the purchase of a cable modem from Suddenlink for $30. But having no nearby jack, they had to install a new coax cable to my PC for $30 that was routed in the crawl space under our house. The Suddenlink modem connects to either a USB port or a LAN (local area network) card in your PC. I chose the latter because I already had a LAN card. All that was left to do was activate the card and instantly connect to the Internet. My Eudora and Outlook Express mail program options had to be changed to show Suddenlink as my default account. I cancelled our Callwave $34/yr answering service and Embarq's call-forwarding phone service since they were no longer needed without dial-up Internet access. Our phone line is now available 24/7 that makes my wife happy.

I used my desktop and laptop PC dialed into the Internet so there was now the question of how they could both be used on Suddenlink's cable service. My son-in-law solved the problem by sending me a NetGear wireless router. I already had a NetGear wireless card plugged into my laptop so there was nothing left to do but install the router next to my desktop and have Windows XP's network wizard set up a wireless network. There were a few problems doing this but with the help of Suddenlink's support group on the phone all went well and both my desktop and laptop can now access Internet at over 1 megabit/sec. All I need now is to set up my two computers for sharing files which I'm working on.

I love the new 1-megabit service. Most Suddenlink members have higher speeds at higher costs and recently Suddenlink even doubled the speed for those paying for 4 megabits/sec up to 8 megabits/sec at no additional charge, so it appears that they’re quite competitive. So far, I've had no trouble but if cable TV goes out so goes Internet access. However, I still have free JUNO dialup (www.juno.com) that can be used to access Internet and check Suddenlink's webmail for incoming mail if our cable goes out.