1stup.com - another one bite the dust

[Son Nguyen]

Providing free Internet access for many places, including Altavista, Excite,... it going out of business as I received this message from AV.
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We regret to inform you that AltaVista's free Internet access will terminate service on December 10th. AltaVista has been forced to discontinue this offering because the company who provided the service and telecommunications infrastructure for it, 1stUp Corp., is going out of business. This change will not affect the availability of our search services at AltaVista.com


AltaVista thoroughly investigated finding another supplier to provide a free Internet access service. However, we were unable to find a company that was able to meet the needs of our Members.
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It also one of many CMGI's "small" companies (including Altavista)
So what left for free internet users? Juno?

[Hierophant]

NetZero.com is still going strong and posting increasing revenues.

[eradtke]

Juno has been cutting back on access number coverage. There are a few other providers around that still offer free access though.

Also, this was discussed on SitePoint a few days ago if you want to search and find some more peoples' responses.

[Justin S]

Yeah, I heard about this on the news yesterday. What came to my mind was that there are a lot of sites that use 1stUp to provide their free Internet, so all of those will have to stop as well. Ouch...

[jamesglewisf]

This will be a bummer for my friend. It is his backup service when AOL is on the fritz. Bummer.

[Smarky]

you should see the trouble we had in the UK with Altavista internet access they offered free calls for a one of £50 turns out there service was fake and it never actually started.

[mjames]

I also heard that Excite's free ISP service is going down, too. The cause of both AltaVista and Excite's loss of this service is because the providor went out of business, I believe.

[eradtke]

Yes, 1stUp was the providor behind Excite's free access, AltaVista's free access, and a number of others. It is a surprise to me that neither AltaVista nor Excite tried finding a replacement service, since there are several out there.

[Nicky]

In the UK the MD of Altavista actually appeared on TV saying sorry to the people who had signed up for the service! Can you believe that? Of course he then went on to blame everyone but Altavista for their problems!

[jumpthru]

Originally posted by eradtke
Yes, 1stUp was the providor behind Excite's free access, AltaVista's free access, and a number of others. It is a surprise to me that neither AltaVista nor Excite tried finding a replacement service, since there are several out there.

In the email I got from them, it says they tried, but didn't find any they think would be good enough for their users. It also said they are going to continually look for a different system to use...

BTW: nocharge.com is a good free service...

[av1998]

Many of the major Free ISP providers have been suffering due to the recent economical downturn. Earlier in the year, while things were still 'rosy', 2 of the most influential and powerful Free ISP providers out there are Spinway and 1stUp. Spinway has big name partners such as BlueLight/Yahoo, Spiegel and others. 1stUp has their own line of major partners as well, including Excite, Lycos, MyPoints and so on.

Well, Spinway is officially non-existent as a company anymore. Their assets and properties have been taken over by BlueLight. 1stUp is also winding down operations, hence, at this point in time ..... I believe Excite/FreeLane does in fact have difficulty finding a reliable and reputable source.

[Plebius]

The demise of 1stup.com has finally motivated me to get the free access through my university to work right. I'm glad I no longer deal with those annoying ads.

[Lorina]

Is Bluelight on the rocks as well? My brother & my mom were using it, and said there's no longer access numbers for our area (Pennsylvania).

[Plebius]

I think they are. I tried using them earlier today and they didn't have access in my area anymore.

[av1998]

BlueLight, as I mentioned earlier, has been restructuring their operations after the Spinway acquisition. As such, their national access numbers have been going through some changes. Here is their alert:

http://www.bluelight.com/ispalert/

Hope this helps some of you get back on track.