When choosing your first Internet service provider, you need to do some careful comparisons. So we've provided this guide to help you through this minefield.

Unless you're lucky enough to work or study at an organisation which offers an Internet connection, you'll need an Internet service provider (ISP) to connect to the Net.

Choosing an Internet service provider is not an easy task. If you're new to the Internet, you'll encounter a whole new world of jargon and sales talk, while navigating a maze of pricing schemes and performance claims. And there are some 250 ISPs around the country!

Pricing schemes
Internet pricing is a complex issue and it certainly pays to think beyond the simple 'per hour' rate. Here are the types of charges you're most likely to encounter.

Registration or joining fee. Many ISPs charge this fee, which you pay as you sign up. This is usually accompanied by a quantity of 'free' hours, although there's nothing free about them: you've already paid for them with your registration fee. On the other hand, there are a few ISPs who charge no joining fee but your first five and eight hours (respectively) are free.

Ongoing charges. Then comes the cost of using the Internet. You'll encounter three main charging schemes:

• A set per-hour rate. In Australia the average hourly rate is around $5 or less. These rates can sometimes be reduced by dialling in 'off-peak' times -- the exact definition of which varies from one ISP to the next.
  
• A set per-month plan. These will permit you to use a certain number of online hours every month: you might pay $40 per month for 10 hours online, which works out to $4 per hour. As the monthly subscription payment increases, the actual hourly rate falls to the point where you may only be paying $1 per hour -- provided you sign up for something like 100 hours per month. In effect, you're bulk buying online time from the ISP.
  
  It's up to you to make sure you use that time -- few ISPs allow you to carry over unused hours from one month to the next. On the other hand, if you exceed your monthly allotment, you will normally be charged for additional hours at the standard hourly rate.
  
• Flat 'all you can surf' fee. This is generally about $40 per month for what is advertised as 'unlimited time'. The allure of dialling into the Net and staying online all day and all night is misleading: to avoid users hogging the lines, most flat rate schemes limit each online session to one or two hours, after which your connection is cut off. You can dial in as many times as you want during the day or night, but you'll always face that same cut-off point. Be careful about locking yourself in for too long -- you may lose interest.

Make sure it's a local call!
A risk of stating the obvious, this is the most important pricing factor of all. Make sure you can dial into the ISP for the price of a local call. What's the point of saving on ISP fees only to rack up hundreds of dollars in STD phone charges?

What if there's no local ISP? Even the cheapest form of long-distance pricing, the community call rate, can add $5 per hour during weekdays on top of any hourly fee levied by your service provider.

At those prices you don't surf the Net -- you quickly dive in and rush out, all the time looking over your shoulder at the clock.

If you're in a position to compare local ISPs with nearby city nodes, you could find that community call rates make it more affordable to use a city-based ISP who charges a flat monthly rate, or offers a faster connection with fewer drop-outs.

You can further reduce STD costs by calling during the graveyard shift (10pm and 8am Monday to Friday, or 6pm Friday through the weekend) when phone rates fall to as little as a third of the peak weekday daytime costs.

Investigate savings plans which can trim call costs or extend the off-peak period -- call Telstra or Optus for more information.

Support
A good level of support can be crucial to making your online experiences happy ones. The smarter ISPs have realised that the market has shifted away from the propeller-heads and towards business and home users to whom the Internet is simply another computing application. These providers have adapted their support mechanisms accordingly.

The main two things two look for are:

1. Times available. Ensure your ISP offers support during those times when you'll be using the Internet. For most people this means evenings and weekends. Any ISP who limits their support to 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday cannot be serious about catering to the home or hobbyist user.

2. Cost of the call. The cost of calling for help is another matter altogether. Some ISPs maintain a toll-free 1800 number or a 1300 number (which costs the same as a local call). Others have no such facility, so if you don't reside in the same city as the ISP's head office, you'll be up for STD charges. Others still use 190x numbers, for which you'll pay $2 per minute. Check the ISP's support policy: some will only assist with configuring and using the software they supply. The ability to fax setup sheets detailing software configuration and troubleshooting tips also has merit.

Local or national?
It's a myth that small Internet service providers will always have lower prices or offer better support than the national outfits.

There are some very professional ISPs serving the local community where low-overhead operations translate into cheap rates and very personal attention. There are also some ISPs running on creaky old Unix machines sitting in the spare room with non-existent customer service. Some of the same observations can be made about the big Australia-wide players, too!

We recommend you investigate all the options and compare all the deals. What it comes down to is finding an ISP which has the right mix of pricing, support and performance for you.

Software to get you started
ISPs usually supply newcomers with an 'access kit' which includes a Web browser -- either Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, depending on the ISP's affiliation -- with integrated e-mail and news. It should be pre-configured for dialling into and connecting with your chosen ISP, or accompanied by a clearly written instruction booklet to achieve the same end.

Performance
Once you're online, it's all about speed. Speed means that Web pages are drawn faster on your screen, especially ones laden with heavy graphics and multimedia gimmickry. Speed means you can download files faster and with less chance of drop-out. And speed means you can keep up with even the busiest newsgroups and Internet phone conversations actually work!

So how do you get this speed? The coolest 56Kbps modem is no guarantee of zippy performance.

During our testing for a national ISP comparison in Australian PC User magazine, we saw some painfully slow connections which were difficult enough just to establish, and some which were lightning-fast almost beyond belief.

Here's why performance varies so much:

• When you connect to an ISP they must be able to funnel your data along distribution networks running inside Australia and overseas, typically to the US. These networks need to have ample bandwidth -- enough room for all the users to coexist without noticeably slowing down the system.
  
  Many ISPs, including almost all the smaller local ones, are connected through a national and international 'backbone' link maintained by Telstra. The combined weight of tens of thousands of users puts a significant strain on the link. In extreme cases this is manifested as massive congestion, which renders the Web almost unusable. Telstra regularly upgrades the backbone, with the result that nationwide slowdowns occur less often, but the Internet explosion continues to outstrip available capacity.
  
  The larger service providers remove this roadblock by establishing private networks around Australia and overseas, generally straight into a US gateway. The benefits of this were clearly borne out during our tests. As a rule, the finest performance came from those ISPs who bypassed the Telstra backbone.
  
• Another way in which service providers can increase download speeds is by the use of a proxy server to store or 'cache' the content of popular sites at their local server. All things being equal, this should make for faster file transfers, provided the files you want are the ones they've cached.
  
• Finally, when you dial your ISP, there's got to be a modem waiting to take your call. And, ideally, it should be a modem of equivalent speed to yours -- at the very least 28.8Kbps.
  
  If all the modems are in use, you get that annoying busy signal. The number of modems available compared to the number of users signed up to an ISP is called the 'modem-to-user ratio'.
  
  The accepted standard is a modem-to-user ratio of 10:1, which indicates there is one modem for every 10 users (yes, the numbers are the wrong way around, but that's how the ratio was first expressed and now the term has stuck). A higher ratio means there are more users for every modem and you're more likely to hear that engaged tone.
  
  In theory, Internet service providers try to maintain their ratio by installing more modems as their user base grows. In theory, too, you can ask an ISP for their modem-to-user ratio and add this piece of wisdom to your shopping list. Personally I don't put too much stock in this: knowing the modem-to-user ratio only helps if it is accurate, and if an ISP claims they have a ratio of 8:1 there's no way to tell if this is true -- they won't exactly let you walk into their office, tally up their subscriber base and then count the number of modems on the rack.
  An area in which all ISPs need to improve is the connection process: you dial in, the modems shake hands and then, nothing. Maybe you get to enter your name and password, after which the screen fills with garbage. Not a single ISP was immune from this. Every failed connection is a phone call you have to pay, and even a few errors a day add up.

Your own Web pages
Some ISPs also provide a limited amount of space for you to set up a simple World Wide Web home page on the ISP's Web server. The domain name will be an extension of the service provider's, such as www.supernet.com.au/priscilla. You'll probably only have a few megabytes for text and graphics, but it's enough for a modest place in cyberspace. Some ISPs provide this small amount of disk space for free, while others charge.

To establish your own domain name and run a cutting-edge Web page, ask the ISP to quote on a 'virtual Web server'.