Many students who connect to the Internet from their homes through SIUC’s Internet access have seen these words repeatedly as they wait for up to an hour to use services like e-mail or the World Wide Web.

For a fee, local Internet providers say they can offer quick access to the Internet, personal homepages on the Web and complete newsgroup access.

SIUC’s Information Technology provides free Internet access and technical support to students and faculty, but administrators say the amount of traffic on the University’s 80 modems makes a quick connection unlikely.

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Joel Kimme, who works at the Information Technology Student Help Desk, said he estimates the average time to connect through the server is 15 – 20 minutes, sometimes much longer.

Private Internet providers in Southern Illinois connect customers to the Net for a monthly subscription rate that varies by company and the amount of time a subscriber wants to spend online.

Dan Ellison, President of Allied Access, Inc., in Murphysboro, said his service encourages subscribers to buy unlimited access time, a package that costs $50 a month, but users can buy access and 10 free hours online for $13 a month. He said the company uses 28,800 baud (bits-per-second) and 33,600 baud modems and makes sure there are never more than eight subscribers for every modem.

If we have 81 subscribers and only ten modems, we’ll buy another modem, he said. You’ll seldom if ever get a busy signal.

Jon Lyons, director of corporate technical sales for Midwest Internet of Carbondale, said the most obvious benefit subscribers see in its service is the speed with which one can connect to the Internet.

They can usually connect on the first try or, in peak (usage) hours, on the second, he said. I know people who have had to try over 100 times to connect through SIU.

Service packages at Midwest Internet range from $10 a month for 10 free hours and $1.50 an hour thereafter, to $35 a month for 200 free hours and $1 each additional hour, Lyons said.

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Lyons said Midwest Internet only uses 28,800-baud or faster modems, while SIUC uses both 28,800 and 14,400-baud modems.

If you have a 28.8 (modem) and you connect with us, you’ll get connected at that speed, he said.

Scott Bridges, data processing analyst for SIUC’s Information Technology, said accessing the Internet by dialing in to SIUC’s modems can be difficult, and students may wish to subscribe to a paid provider.

(Subscribing to a provider) can be pretty attractive, and we don’t discourage it, he said. Our dial-in modems are pretty well utilized.

Bridges said the Campus Wide Information System (CWIS) and SIUC’s Web site are easy to get to and not overloaded at all. Only the dial-in system takes time to get through.

Once you get dialed in, our Web response time is great, he said.

Web pages are available to professors, the administration and students who are sponsored by a department, Bridges said.

We encourage professors to use the Web for teaching and research, he said. But providing Web space for students raises questions of responsibility for content. This is an ongoing debate at universities nationwide, not just at SIU.

Allied Access provides free personal Web space of up to one megabyte, Ellison said. He said subscribers can update their sites as often as they wish, using File Transfer Protocol (FTP), a process by which files are transfered over the Internet.

Lyons said Midwest, which offers free personal Web pages of up to 500k, requires users to e-mail Web page updates to the company’s staff.

We don’t want to tie up our server that much, he said. A lot of people don’t know FTP.

Allied Access provides 24-hour technical support seven days a week, the only local provider to do so, Ellison said.

Technical support at Midwest Internet is available 9 a.m. – 9 p.m. seven days a week, Lyons said.