We can't repeat this enough times. Before you sign up with a new ISP, please be certain that you are looking at the current phone number list for the ISP, and call the BUSINESS OFFICE of your local phone company to be sure that the ISP's dialup number is a local phone call.

If you have chosen to switch your local phone service to a CLEC instead of your default local "Baby Bell" phone company (SBC, Verizon, Qwest, Southern Bell), this is especially important, as your new "Local" phone company may define what is a local call differently than the information printed in your old "Baby Bell" Phone Directory.

It is often the case that ISP phone numbers are in a prefix that is not listed in the phone book at all. It is very easy to run up a phone bill of $1000 in a month if you change ISPs or change local phone companies without checking this out FIRST.

ISPs do not have "phone number magic". If you have to dial a "1" in order to reach the ISP's modem, in almost all cases that is telling you that it is a long distance call. However, not having to dial "1" is not a guarantee that it isn't a per-minute charged call, especially in cities like Chicago that have "band" or "zone" systems.

We have stacks of emails from people who jumped at the chance to save a few dollars a month - only to have the company disappear into the night a month or two later with no real address, no traceable business name, no person's name to track down.

In some cases, it is well-intentioned people with no clue how to run a business. It may be an overly bright well-intentioned 13 year old who can't understand why minors aren't allowed to make business contracts with major Telecomm companies, or it may just be a deliberate scam to charge your credit card for $99 and vanish.

We don't know of a single ISP that will not allow you to prepay for a year after you've been a customer on a month-to-month basis for a few months. If you've settled in and the services work, and tech support fixes problems when you need them, and the billing is working correctly, then you can take advantage of the lower prices of making a longer term commitment.

Before you do send off payment for a year in advance, carefully read the ISP's refund policy. If you are transferred, are unable to connect, or the ISP is no longer able to offer service that is a local call, will you get some portion of your money back, or is the entire amount non-refundable?

Does the ISP have the right in their TOS to terminate your account for overuse of their system? Posting an "off-topic" message to Usenet? If they create a pretense to cancel the account, do you forfeit the entire amount you've prepaid?

The time to check this out is before you hand over the money, not after you or the ISP decide to close the account.

One of the ways that an ISP can offer a REALLY low monthly price is to keep their expenses low. One obvious way is to not provide technical support.

If you are signing up with an ISP that is not in your city, look to see if the technical support number is a toll-free call. Some of the "free" ISPs not only don't provide a toll-free number, they charge as much as $10.95 a call or $1.95 per minute for the tech support call - even if the problem turns out to be their fault!

What some ISPs mean by 24x7 support is that their voicemail system will take your message or you can send them an email 24x7. They may not read the mail until Monday afternoon.

Once you think you've found "the perfect ISP", give their tech support line a call at a time they say the support line is staffed and ask them a relevant question to help you make your decision. The time to find out about the quality of the support is before you've printed up business cards with your email address.

Under the Federal Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA), you have substantial rights to dispute charges, demand a chargeback for an item in dispute, and to require your credit card company to reject all future charges from an ISP IF you pay by credit card.

If you pay for your ISP service by debit card or check draft (even if it says VISA or MasterCard on the debit card), the FCRA does not apply to your transaction. Electronic charges are governed by the Electronic Fund Transfer Act (EFTA), which has substantially weaker consumer rights than credit cards.

For details about the EFTA, visit the FTC Web site. The most important thing to understand about the use of a debit card is that your financial institution has no right to intervene and charge back items in dispute. Quoting from the FTC web site: "When you use an electronic fund transfer, the EFT Act does not give you the right to stop payment. If your purchase is defective or your order is not delivered, it is as if you had paid cash. That is, it is up to you to resolve the problem with the seller and get your money back." In other words, once the bank has paid the ISP, the ONLY way to get your money back is to sue the ISP.

Disclaimer: FindAnISP is not a provider of legal services, and the above text and the remainder of the web site is not legal advice.

To obtain help with an ISP dispute, please contact your State's Consumer Protection office. In some cases, the state government may intervene in your case, or even file a class action lawsuit if the problem affects enough people.

Back in 1996, AOL was required to reform its cancellation process and provide refunds as a result of such an action by a number of states that banded together to force AOL to adopt reasonable business practices.

Given the amount of money typically involved with an ISP account, it is unlikely that an attorney will get involved (and the ISP knows that). Small claims court may get you a judgment, but you then still have to collect it.

Back in the early days of the commercial ISP business, some ISPs had problems with signing people up for prepaid, unlimited access only to have the customers receive a busy signal all of the time (sound like AOL in 1996?).

ISPs learned that you are much less likely to blame them if they start dumping users who are already online to free up a line rather than letting a new caller get a busy signal.

The problem comes if that is the only measure they are using to fight inadequate capacity in their modem banks. The way to spot this problem is that if you're being disconnected every five minutes at 9 PM on a weeknight, but you can stay online for 6 hours on a Sunday morning, that's pretty good proof that you're being deliberately disconnected from an oversubscribed modem pool.

In fairness to the ISP, some times the disconnects are being done by the phone company, not the ISP. However, the ISP (or their wholesaler) has made decisions about which Central Office to use to gather the incoming calls.

An ISP that blames this on their wholesaler and says "there is nothing we can do about it" isn't trying very hard. They decided which wholesaler to use in your city - they send the wholesaler a check every month.

There are always options, including not offering service in cities where the wholesaler does not have adequate capacity, offering to switch you for free to another wholesaler network, or offering you a refund.

This has become such a widespread problem that it was recently the subject of a Dilbert cartoon. There are several variants of this business practice. AOL served as the original prototype back in 1996 - they made a rule that the only way to cancel your account is to call an 800 number, and then understaffed the call centers so people have to wait on hold for an hour or more, only to have the phone call accidentally disconnected.

Once you've narrowed down your list of ISP choices, visit the ISP web site again and see if you can figure out what to do if this marriage ends and you need to leave. Usually, the requirements of how to cancel an account should be contained in the Terms of Service (TOS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). If you can't tell what happens if you want to cancel the account, don't sign up.

If you drive past this flashing red light, you may find out that when you cancel, they get to charge you a cancellation fee, you might have to tell them 30 days ahead of time by personally visiting their office in Adak Alaska, you may have to send an email to an email address that is always full - it's hard to say how difficult an ISP may try to make it to close your account.

NEVER assume that the ISP charges no setup fee - unless it clearly says so right on the page where you sign up. As much as we thought we know about ISPs, we still got "dinged" for $25 by a local ISP in New England because we were in a hurry, and they did a good job of hiding the setup fee down in the fine print of their user agreement. We've seen cases where the front page says "No Setup Fee", but the agreement says there is a setup fee. Sloppy website? Maybe. Maybe not.

As we've gathered more data from more ISPs, it is also apparent that some ISPs heavily load up the 2nd email account, with as much as a $10 setup fee and $5/month. If you live alone, this is of no interest, but if you will be sharing the account with your family or other special person, this can be an expensive matter.

Now, in fairness to the ISPs, what this is often reflecting is that when more than one person is using the same account, the number of hours per month used goes up (and the costs to the ISP). Better if the ISP offers a "Family Plan" and tailors it to the needs of a family.

ISPs frequently have a problem with simultaneous use of an account by two people - especially if they are using a wholesaler.

If you are using the account from work, and your spouse dials in from home at the same time, ISPs may hit you for an hourly rate for the time you are both online, charge you a "fine" for violating the TOS, or cancel your non-refundable prepaid account. If this could happen to you, ask about their policy BEFORE you send the money.

When challenged about grossly unreasonable charges for "abusing" the resources of the ISP, or for exceeding limits on web space traffic, ISPs have almost always said "Well, we just put that language in there to give us the option - we've never actually charged anyone for that".

If that sounds like a line a car salesman used last time you bought a car, you're correct. If they have no intention to enforce the terms of the contract, then they should quickly agree to strike the language. They won't. What does that tell you?

One of the growing problems in the US and around the world is identity theft. One of the techniques that is used is to get people to submit their personal information to a fake web site. (Hackers and script kiddies enjoy deliberately spelling words in hacker speak, frequently replace leading "f"s in words with "ph" - hence "phake" and "phree".

A phake web site will phrequently offer you something for phree, like a password to a phree pr0n website. The more illegal the content of that phree web site, the less likely you are to contact the police to report that you've been ripped off. Think of this as the internet's version of the age old "pigeon drop".

The phake ISP is a milder variant - it just promises you a phree ISP account or an unbelievably low price. A full featured account needs to cost around $10 - if it contains less features, like limited hours, no web space, no Usenet, only one email, then it might be possible to get a bare bones account for $7/month... anything cheaper needs to be approached VERY cautiously.

Phake ISPs have several red flags - just because an ISP has all of these warning signs, that doesn't make it phake - but it does make it important for you to check out carefully

• No contact information online
• Only way to contact ISP is via email (The "owner" may live in Eastern Europe)
• Web pages are hosted on a subdomain or a free web hosting service
• Signup form is not secure - to get a secure web site, the domain owner must prove to the certificate authority who they are and provide information that verifies their identity. Do NOT submit information in a secure form if the Security Certificate is a trial certificate, expired, does not match the domain name of the web server, or is based on an unknown certificate authority or has an invalid certificate chain. Be sure you have your web browser enabled to verify that certificates have not been revoked. This will slow down your access to secure web pages, but protects you against a rogue certificate.
• Signup form that asks for inappropriate information - an ISP has no business asking your Social Security number, your driver's license number, your place of birth or your mother's maiden name. These are all items which greatly simplify the job of someone engaging in identity theft. The only things that an ISP has a legitimate right to know are your real name, your current address, a contact phone number and your credit card number (or checking account if you choose to have them draft your account)

  Even if the ISP is completely legitimate and well-intentioned, if you hand over this key personal information and a hacker breaks into their computer or a minimum-wage employee sells a copy of the information to an identity thief, you've got a problem. Just say "NO".

This is a work in progress - we're sure there are other ways people have been burned by a bad choice.

We don't have the resources to intervene and solve your problem, but sharing your experiences with us helps to improve the understanding we have of the problems people are having, and will help us improve our own data gathering process.

Drop us a line at consumerinfo(@)findanisp.com and share your story.

We do not have a mailing list and we won't give your email address to anyone. (See the privacy statement at the bottom of the page)

You might also want to share your experience with others by submitting a customer rating. Do a search by ISP Name, and you should find a link to submit a review.