Well, this is my review of Netzero Hi-speed dial-up. First of all, unknown to most, Netzero is a subsidary of United Online, which also owns Juno dial-up internet.

Pros
With the 15 dollar per month fee, you get a 1gb mailbox, 5 e-mail adresses, the accelerator software, and a reasonably fast dial-up connection. The e-mail is very nice, but is not the best. There are not many pros.

Cons
This will be the larger section. First, you must use the Netzero software to connect to their network. This would not be a problem, except for the fact that it contains ads, and it does not work for linux. In the US, there are always ads on the tv for the accelerator software in which they claim that you can surf at broadband speeds. So far, I have yet to see a improvement on my surfing speed. In fact, on my gaming PC, I have seen a drop in surfing speed. The software does not work in firefox. The image quality is terrible, even with the acceleration at minimum. I have also witnessed a large amount of connection drops.

I am going to give this product 2 ratings, one for the average user, the other for the computer guru.

Average user rating:8 out of 10
Computer savvy user rating: 4 out of 10

I never knew that Netzero had any pros at all. Everyone at my school complained about how bad it is and I went on the internet at my friends house (he has Netzero) and it was the worst internet experience I have ever had. It is too slow and that is comming from someone who had dial up for 3 years.

I thought its free service wasnt bad. But, it was free so that might affect my judgement.

I had used it whenever my internet died on me...

If you live in the area, HBC is a good cable/phone/internet company. It works really well. Its not dial up either so it doesn't suck badly. But HBC works well and if your in the area, its good. Its better than Charter.

Hmmm... dial-up really isn't my thing... and I'm sure a lot of people want broadband anyways. I'd suggest Verizon DSL if it's available in your area. It's also only $15/month. It's slow compared to my 10mbps connection (this thing goes up to 768kbps), but it's DSL none-the-less. I'm not sure if you get email or an accelerator, but there're a lot of free alternatives:

- gmail has around 2 GB of space
- google also has a broadband accelerator http://webaccelerator.google.com/