There are reckoned to be approximately 30 million people with access to the Internet. There is no other communications medium growing at anything like this rate. Every college in the UK, Europe and the USA has access to the Internet. All students and academics who want it can reasonably be assumed to have it. Planet Internet, an independent company, has also made an equivalent proposal.
Online services are private equivalents of the public Internet.
Compuserve UK has 250,000 members, growing by 10,000 per month. All the main online services now provide gateways outward into the public Internet. By contrast with the online services, ISPs tend to offer fixed price annual or monthly subscriptions regardless of usage. Netcom, the largest Internet Service Provider in the US has about 350,000 users. Demon Internet is the UK's largest ISP with about 50,000 users.