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NetZero is an Internet Service Provider based in Woodland Hills, California. It is a subsidiary of United Online, owner of Juno Online Services and BlueLight Internet Services.
History NetZero, along with its now-sister company BlueLight Internet (which was originally co-owned by Kmart and Yahoo!), originally provided free Internet access to users. It claimed to offer free Internet service forever, in exchange for displaying ads on a permanent toolbar. The company previously owned both Simpli and RocketCash. Starting in January 2001, NetZero began charging for access time over 40 hours per month. Users who exceeded 40 hours were directed to the company's "Platinum" service, which provided unlimited access for $9.95 NetZero later lowered the threshold for Platinum to 10 hours per month. Free service was still offered to a maximum of 10 hours a month. In June 2005, the company released a new client that replaced the advertising bar with an Internet Explorer browser helper object. In July 2005, NetZero introduced a service called "3G," standing for the "third generation of Internet". The company charged $9.95 for the service, claiming it was so fast, "you wouldn't believe it wasn't broadband". As dial-up connections are limited in speed by the Federal Communications Commission, the service does not actually increase speeds, but pre-fetches HTML markup, JavaScript and other small files and compresses them. Video, images, and other non-text files are not compressed. This technology also utilizes the user's cache to prevent redownloading. NetZero also has versions of its proprietary dial-up software for computers running Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and Linux. The Linux version of the NetZero software is advertised by NetZero as being for Linspire, however the software can be installed on any Debian-based Linux distribution. To download the Mac or Linux dialers, you must be subscribed to the Premium service. In addition, the Linux version of NetZero requires the Java Runtime Environment to be installed prior to use of the NetZero dialer. (For example: Under its default installation, Ubuntu Linux is incapable of running the NetZero dialer.) Problems | ||||||||
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