The first cracks in that barrier appeared when free providers, including BT, began offering free weekend calls to the net. The recent announcements by AOL and Freeserve of 1p per minute Internet calls and ten hours free use per month mean that the introduction of truly free access via an 0800 number is only a matter of time. T he rapid drop in the costs of getting online mean nothing for the upper classes, who have been online since the early 1990s, if they so desired. The tens of thousands of people signing up for Freeserve and its competitors every week are people for whom cost was and still is a barrier to using the net. The Internet revolution taking place today is bringing millions of working class families online for the first time.
Pages take forever to download.
Graphics on a page become an annoyance, not a pleasure. Multimedia including videos and audios are unrealistic so long as we are limited by our current primitive analog connections to the net from our homes. A ll that is about to end too. BT has announced that as of October 1999, it will begin making high speed digital access to the net available through existing telephone lines. This technology is called ADSL and has existed for some time.