>I have a friend who is thinking of switching from a dial-up ISP to cable modem. This would be perfect for her home office, but she still needs occasional dial-up access from another office. This really is very occasional, and will be primarily for checking e-mail on the cable modem ISP's account(s).
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>I was thinking of setting up one of the "free" ISPs (AltaVista, Yahoo! etc.) at the secondary office, and giving it a test. If anyone has had any experience with these ISPs could you please comment:
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>1. Do you need special access software, and does that interfere with any other preconfigured dial-up access with other ISPs?
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>2. Can you access e-mail accounts other than those of the free ISP?
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>3. Realistically, can you get a connection at the local access number(s)?
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>4. Any other limitations/restrictions/gotchas/comments?

To add, I have looked at them, and know several who have or are using them, especially for backups or alternates, as you are looking at. They generally work okay, with a couple little gotchas that may be okay for certain situations, aside from ads and surveys, which go with the territory:

1) They tend to boot you off more frequently than a paid ISP.
2) There is usually a full privacy disclaimer.

For your usage, this may be fine - in fact I use Yahoo as a "proxy" email server to access email from all my personal accounts from anywhere, in much the same way.