Free phone calls. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, there are several ways to get your Mudcat.

1. Ricochect modem. This is a wireless link to the internet. About $30/month for unlimited use. Nice part, dosn't tie up a phone line, bad part, only about 28k and $30/month.

2. Dial up modem. I have an account with Slip.Net. However the 56kbaud modem mostly does about 35-40K About $20/mo. Not real realable. Also sometimes have to pay message units if you call outside your "discrict"

3. Cable TV connection. One of my friends has this. quite fast.

4. ISDN Fast, but a per/min charge on top of the ISP bill. Could be $$$.

5. DSL Digital Subscriber Line. Ahhh mostest for leastest. About $40/mo. Supposed to be. 600kdown/128kup. But really much faster than that. Goes over standard phone line, with small wall box. You must have 10BaseT networking on your computer.

Other advantages?

You can do IP aliasing. This lets you put several computers on the net for one price. I normaly have three systems on the net at once. they all work just fine, over the single line. I have a FreeBSD box serving as the IP ailas provider, and as a gateway.

Works great!

-Fadac