Pros: Free, solid service, rarely busy.
Cons: Ad bar still has some problems with internet speed.

In today's world of internet computing, speed and color is basically what websurfers are lookinig for in thier internet sites and connection. AltaVista(AV) internet service offers free 56K and slower dial-up connections nation-wide if you are willing to play thier java/javascript banner bar. While I do like the access and the low chances of a busy signal, some problems do arise on my 36.6K home machine modem: the multiple IE5 frames that make up the "abbreviated" ad-bar slow down my internet connection to an almost intolerable rate.

Physical Connectivity
The physical offerings of this service are simply as-advertised. In return for running thier semi-adjustable-size adbar on some portion of the screen, you recieve dial-up internet access over existing phone lines at speeds of up to 53K (The network is technically capable of a 56K data transfer rate but the FCC has limited telephony data transfer to 56Kps).

True, I have never recieved a 53K connection, the highest I have gotten was 48.8 at a family member's house because she lives very close to where the AV dial-up server resides. It can handle a wide range of protocols from the 28.8K V3 modems to new 56.6 V9 voice-capable connections. If you arent getting very good speeds, you might want to check where you are in relation to the telephone company, the longer the distance, the slower the connection.

Software Ad-bar
The ad-bar that AV has no doubt spent quite a sum of money engineering simply is unwieldy in today's speed conscious world of free ISPs. What the bar is in its "minimized" form is simply a windows program that uses a browser form with some modifications to make the application display on top of all other programs and makes the other applications resize according to the new amount of availible space.

Since it uses DLLs and very few proprietary OCXs, the actual application size on your hard drive is ridiculously small. The question that I first began to ask was how can a program so dang small, even with all of the dial-up code and an OCX to be the top application, slow my connection so dang much. The answer lies in the page that the bar displays. In reality, the bar is made of several pages done in a frames configuration to resemble a windows application with a custom skin.

Most of the actual ad display and button effects are done with javascript which speeds up thier ad system but the effect is much like giving running shoes to a turtle. Because the ad-bar is web-based, it requires a channel of your dial-up connection through your windows TCPIP DLL and hence slows down your internet experience.

Side Bennies
In registering for the AV dialup internet service, you are signing up to recive all of the benefits of an Alta Vista website membership. This includes free web-based email, stock porfolio tracking, email list submission (junk mail) and subjects you to a truckload of email which you have, on your appication the very small, often overlooked option of not recieving. AltaVista also requires (through a system command executed by the Ad-bar at the end of initialization) that you start off at live.av.com, not where your browser has the default startup location.

The features that are offered to you are really not all that bad for what you pay for them but you do get what you pay for in this case and you are paying them upwards of $10/month (on average) in ad veiws.

Overall
In all honesty, I would have to recommend this service to anyone looking for a cheap isp even if it does have some ad-bar problems to resolve. A good, solid offering to the ISP community by AltaVista. This service offers features, speed, and reliability even though some of the software-side speed code could be improved.