Juno

March 2009. If you need dial-up Internet access for no more than 10 hours per month, you can get it free from Juno -- in exchange for putting up with fairly obtrusive advertising. Exceed the 10 hours and you'll be charged $10 per month, and some users complain that then it's hard to cancel -- the charges keep coming. Like all dial-up Internet service, speeds are very slow compared with DSL or cable, but users say that for ordinary web browsing and checking e-mail, Juno is a real bargain. NetZero is owned by the same company, United Online, but scores much lower in reliability in one major survey. If you need unlimited dial-up access, reviews favor AT&T Basic DSL (*est. $20 to $35 per month), which gives much faster download speeds.

Juno and NetZero's parent company is included in the most recent J.D. Power and Associates survey of more than 17,000 ISP users. Consumer Reports reviews Juno and NetZero separately, ranking them in comparison with each other and with five other dial-up ISPs, based on reliability, speed and technical support. We also found a handful of more detailed customer-written reviews of Juno at Viewpoints.com. PC Magazine reviews NetZero, but not Juno. Epinions.com has accumulated nearly 600 reviews of NetZero, but most are so many years old that it's not clear that they still apply, and it's not clear that they apply equally to Juno.