These accounts provide full Internet access by establishing a PPP network connection to your computer or network via our v.90 56K modem banks or via ISDN. Electronic mail, Usenet News, and access to free software are all available to you. Please read the "quality of service" statement below or click here for pricing.

Quality of Service
We have designed our network to provide the highest quality Internet connections possible. We started with the best hardware equipment available, and added the latest software to create a fast, reliable, and fault-tolerant network.

One of the key questions to be answered during this setup process was "unlimited accounts?". There are 2 choices any ISP can make:

1) Offer unlimited accounts or

2) Limit accounts to a specific amount of time per month.

Both have advantages and disadvantages. We chose to offer time limited accounts in order to give the best quality connection. The advantages of this choice to you as a dial-up customer are:

1) We do not disconnect users after any amount of time of inactivity or activity - you choose when you get on and when you get off of the Internet (unlimited ISP's usually disconnect after 15 minutes of inactivity and 4 hours regardless of activity). This means no interrupted downloads or online games!

2) Less or no busy signals. Since there is a time limit to the usage (240 hours/month - an average of 8 hours/day) our customers disconnect when they are not using the service. This frees up a modem to be used by someone who needs it. As unlimited ISP's begin to have busy signals their customers start to try to stay connected all of the time to avoid them thus causing more busy signals. This in turn leads the ISP to start disconnecting users more often to alleviate this problem. Hence your "unlimited account" becomes a busy signal followed by constant disconnects. We work with our customers to provide everyone with a quality connection, instead of against them.

3) Fast transfer speeds. We have load balancing for our multiple T-1's to the Internet ensuring a consistently fast transfer speed. Since people don't leave their computer connected to the Internet this limits sharing of files through services such as Napster to the times when people are at their computer. When people are on an "Unlimited ISP" they leave their computer running on the Internet to share songs. Every song that is downloaded by a user from a client computer on that network takes bandwidth away from all the other users. An example of how this affects your service is: Customer A chooses to leave his computer connected to the Internet to share songs, and John Doe in Seattle, WA decides that he wants a song from that computer and begins to download it. Any ISP has a finite amount of bandwidth therefore the amount of bandwidth available to you, Customer B, is less, and you get a slow download rate. You are a paying customer and yet it is because Customer A (who is doing nothing wrong since he was sold an "unlimited account") and John Doe in Seattle, WA (who simply wants a song for his collection), you have a slow Internet connection. Our time limit causes our customers to prioritize Internet usage and changes the decision making process for usage. And it is this responsible Internet usage by our customers that keeps our service of the highest quality possible.

View geeksnet's Services Agreement