Many customers of AOL, the largest commercial ISP, have been dissatisfied with the slow response at peak hours. AOL has responded by adding additional capacity. One way of investigating the reliability of ISPs is to ask the sales people at your local computer store about their experiences. Some people have anxiety that connecting a computer to the Internet will instantly expose them to sabotage, viruses, pornography, and a host of other evils. These anxieties are exaggerated in the popular press and can be mitigated with proper information and relatively simple hardware and software solutions.
Numerous consultants are available to implement firewalls and other network security processes.
The simplest way to begin using the Internet in large organizations is to take an inexpensive personal computer, disconnect it from the network, install virus protection software, and connect to the Internet via a phone line. If the users of the Internet can prove the value to the organization, the network administrators can consider how to provide access from more terminals. Although computer viruses will not propagate from simple text files, they could be embedded in the executable files attached to email or some dynamic Web pages. The simplest method of improving response time when connecting to the Web is to turn off the graphics.