Working Lunch spoke to What PC who came up with the following information (correct as of 11/2/99):

AmericaOnline - www.aol.co.uk
The AOL service has no connection fee and a light user charge of £4.95 for 3 hours every month. There is currently an introductory offer where the first 100 hours online are free. If you are interested in unlimited access then they charge a monthly fee of £16.95.

AOL offers 5 e-mail addresses and 2MB of web space for your own web site.

- Compuserve - www.compuserve.co.uk
Compuserve's light user charge is £6.50 for five hours although their introductory offer in the first month has unlimited free connection time. Unlimited access has a normal monthly charge of £17.95.

Compuserve offers one e-mail address and 5MB of web space.

Free Services
Obviously the free services are much more competitive because they don't charge any connection fee. Some of the free service providers include:

Freeserve - Dixons www.freeserve.net
Dixons's Freeserve service offers an unlimited number of e-mail addresses and 15MB of web space.

Tesco - www.tesco.net
Tesco offers 5 e-mail addresses and 10MB of web space.

BT Clickfree - www.btclickplus.com
BT offers 5 e-mail addresses but no web space.

But please remember if you have any problems with the free service providers then some of their technical support helplines charge up to £1 per minute.

And even though it may be free to use the service, don't forget that you will have to pay for the telephone call every time you go online, which holds true for both free and and subscription Internet services