I Can't Believe They Are So Popular (Freeserve)

Member Name: darrenloud

Product:	Freeserve
Date:	26/02/01 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: N/A

Disadvantages: All of the above.

I have used freeserve quite a lot at work, it's one of many ISP's my employer uses. For starters, I cannot understand why they are called FREEserve, they aren't free. You have to pay the cost of a local call to connect! I am sure the Trades Description Act prevents companies from using such titles.

Apart from the misleading name, I have noticed a great deal of problems with freeserve. Here are a few of them:

1) Account names: An account name is after the @ in an email address, you can't simply have yourname@freeserve.co.uk. You have to have firstname@lastname.freeserve.co.uk, which is really annoying.

2) Connection speeds: The connection speeds you get are sub-standard. I typically get under 45,000k, usually around 38,000k. This isn't really exceptable these days. However, the connection speed varies depending on where you live.

3) Quality of connection: I have noticed real problems with the quality of the connection. If you aren't familiar with PPP (point to point protocol), thats the typical way of connecting to the net, basically your modem connects with another modem and 'talks' using signals. The signal's on freeserve seem to stop periodically for 10-15 seconds at a time. This is very frustrating, causing delays in websites responding or not opening at all.

Apart from these three problems I have found, there is one another really annoying thing. Once you have installed IE5 (internet explorer 5) from a freeserve disc, the home page is set to freeserve.net/com by default. fair enough, this is quite typical of ISP's to do that, but if you try and remove or change the home page settings, it will go back to freeserve after you restart your computer. This really does bug me.

I think it is important that users have complete control over what software is on their computer. Freeserve seem to think that once you have installed software licenced by them, that everything els
e should be set their way, eg homepage and security settings, default connection, browser, etc.

Obviously, I am not an experienced freeserve user as I have only used it occasionally at work, but from what I have seen I am very disappointed in what they have to offer and will never consider using them at home.

Summary: