WorldOnline > Reviews (72)

THE fastest ISPin the UK, as rated by Internet Magazine. It takes on average less than 9 seconds to download a UK webpage compared to those ranked in positions 3 and below which take 16 seconds plus, meaning WOL (Worldonline) is twice as fast as most ISP's when it comes to UK sites. The difference for U.S. and other European sites is less of a gap due to geographical network distances but any speed differential is welcome.

Their ISP service is first rate and availiablity is almost 100%, rarely do you get a chance to hear an engaged tone, and the mailservers are fast. Send an email to yourself, and you get the message almost instantaneously. There also appears to be no limit on the attachment size as I have received 8mb files as attachments.

Your email address is configured as anythingthingyoulike@username.worldonlin​e.co.uk and allows you to have unlimited email aliases, as anything@username.worldonline.co.uk all gets sent to your mailbox. Great for the family or for creating 'tagged' email addresses for web form submissions (so you can track who is sending you the junk mail!)

There are 2 ways to use their service, 1. keep your existing telecom provider e.g. BT and just dialup using their local call rate 0845 number and pay your normal phone charges for internet access. 2. Switch your telephone line to them and pay them for your line rental (same rate as BT but with slightly cheaper voice calls) and pay a subscription in return for free hours. With the latter method you get a choice of subscribing to Freedom Lite which gives 50 hours off peak a month, I think sufficient for people who work during the day (for a small charge of 2.99 GBP) and Freedom 24 (at 14.99 GBP) which gives you 100 hours surfing a month anytime of the day - enough to satisfy most users. At the moment though they don't have any provision for users to track their used hours, so you have to keep a tab of your time online. Any time used over the allocated hours on these plans is charged at a reasonable 1p per minute even during peak.

This was the UK's first unlimited offpeak ISP (then known as Screaming.net) it came with it's teething problems of course being a pioneer in this area, then they went on to become UK's first 24-7 free ISP service and the teething problems started to disappear, though their billing system was still a shambles caused partly by lack of information supplied to them by BT (they rent the lines off BT). Now the old screaming.net has matured with the it's new owner Worldonline, providing (in my opinion) the fastest and best free access to the internet providing you are prepared to switch your telecom provider. Unfortunately I am not with them anymore as I am a very heavy user, 100 hours is not enough to sustain my needs : ) , but if your usage falls within the allocated hours, then you need to look no further (as of writing) for the best free ISP (which incidently is better than the paid ones as well!) you can sign up at their website worldonline.co.uk ...quite good topical content too.