In computer news this week,

Costco announces free internet service.

The world's largest internet service provider is American Online, claiming to have over 20 million subscribers. AOL has built this customer base over the past decade, and it's been a long hard struggle, which has included class action lawsuits filed against the company for non-performance. It is estimated that millions of users cancel their AOL service monthly, but the company seems to keep picking up more new members with its free offers. AOL is considered a starting point for internet users, and many people then move on to other internet services after becoming net-savvy. AOL now charges $ 21.95 a month for their standard subscription.

Costco began offering its own internet service a couple years ago, for under $ 10 a month. Now they're giving it away free to their 25 million members, and as you walk into our local Costco stores, you'll see a large display of Costco internet cd's free for the taking.

Costco has partnered with Yahoo, one of the leading search engines and portals, which provides a user friendly entry point . The costco free internet services uses Microsoft's internet explorer for navigation, so all your existing favorite places will work. The yahoo/costco home page provides you with choices for top news stories, sports, stock market information, weather, horoscopes, a Costco shopping menu, and of course their search engine.

You can send mail through the default program, microsoft outlook, or choose to use the yahoo mail system. It appears that you can have multiple screen names and email accounts. The one thing I don't see is any personal webspace for storage or for a web page. You get the Yahoo instant messenger for chatting with your friends online.

There are also pre-existing links to a multitude of topics you may be interested in.

The price you pay for free service is a costco banner across the bottom of your screen, similar to most other free services, including Juno and Altavista.

The cd installation program works quickly and easily. You can also download the free program at costco.com - about 3 megs in size.

Another feature of the costco service is that's nationwide. This means that you can access it from anywhere you travel - you just have to download the local access numbers for where you are. The program has minimal hardware requirements, but it is not available for Apple Macintosh users at this time.

The questions here are what impact is this going to have on other existing internet service providers, AOL, Microsoft, Prodigy, and the thousands of local internet service providers, and - will other major corporations offer free internet access also? Why should people pay to access the internet when you are bombarded with ads from your provider, as well as from virtually every web page you surf across ?

Another question is what is the reliability and accessibility of the Costco service. Will you get the busy signals and repeated disconnects that constantly happen with AOL, or will it actually be a service that works, and is free. Seems too good to be true.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 Email: fdspokane@aol.com