Using the Internet ought to be easy, you connect up, sign up and surf away. But as this months 'Which' magazine reports, one in three attempts to connect up to a new service fail, while one in twenty never, ever touched surf. With over a hundred firms offering different Internet deals and ease of access, here is for sure another consumer maze.
Some firms offer local calls, some even free calls.
And with a choice of using telephone lines, digital or cable television lines, not everyone is buying the same Internet. Timely then, that NCET, the National Council for Educational Technology, is doing an education users survey of the Internet business. While the 'Which' report interestingly found users excited about email but disappointed by Internet content, the new survey is about other expectations, like connecting up and getting up to speed. As teachers head for the beaches, NCET's computers will run the Internet services through a series of tests. Specially written software will run a daily schedule comparing how long it takes to access a Web page.