I joined TFI since June 2000. With a 50 pound per year membership fee for free internet access (no call charges) 24 hours a day, it seemed like a pretty good offer. You can only dial up using their software that you download after becoming a member. I can honestly say that it has been frustrating experience. My computer frequently crashed while online and most of the time, I was unable to use it as a multi-tasking machine as long as I was still connected to the Internet. This means that while connected, I could not use the cd rom to listen to music, use other programs to do work and so on as this would result in a crash. Additionally, I was also accasionally logged off after about 2-3 minutes of actively surfing the web. Then an upgrade of their software was available for download, and things seemed a little better. But by then, TFI was already popular as a free internet access ISP. Thus, dialing into their server was a nightmare. Most of the time it was busy, so I had to sit there and keep trying to dial in. And because of the increase in load, I was more frequently logged off. Downloading files also became a frustrating experience. Most of the time, the computer crashed half-way, or the server logged me off.