X2 — it’s the latest in Internet access and it’s now available in Ames.

About 120 Iowa State students have signed up with ISU Net, a new company in town providing Internet access through X2, Omar Akili, head network administrator at ISU Net, said.

Akili said offering X2 is “the big kicker” that sets them apart from other local Internet access companies. “X2 allows you to achieve the quickest download speeds via modem anywhere.”

X2 offers 56K access, or 56 kilobytes per second download speed, which Akili explained is a little misleading because it is not legally achievable by current Federal Communications Commission standards.

The legal limit is 53K, he said, and realistically, most people will connect at around 48 to 53K, depending on where they live in town and how close they are to a phone switch.

Akili said ISU Net offers a package deal of unlimited access for $19.95 a month.

X2 capabilities have been around for about a year and a half, Akili said, but have only really spread in the past six months.

“[ISU students] seem to be up-to-date on all the new technology, and they’ve actually been waiting for it for a while,” Akili said.

He said he was surprised at how many ISU students were familiar with X2, since ISU Net’s ad in the Daily only mentioned X2 and 56K.

“The response was immediate; people knew what it was,” he said. “It’s a product that sells itself.”

Michael McMaster, a senior in computer engineering, said he has been using ISU Net since August and plans to continue using them for Internet access until he graduates.

“They have unlimited access, and they also have high speed, which I can both make use of,” he said.

McMaster said he found out about ISU Net through an ad in the Daily. ISU Net also gives him a second email account, which McMaster said he likes because he can separate his scholastic email messages from his personal and professional ones.

ISU offers off-campus students access through point-to-point protocol (PPP) service.

For a base fee of $7 a month, anyone with a Vincent account can gain dial-up access to the Internet, Sarah Kucera, a student employee at Telecommunications, said.

Whenever a user logs on during a month, the computer will automatically bill them $7, she said. Then when that $7 worth of service is used up, additional hourly charges are added on.

PPP has a rate fee that depends on what time of day someone logs on at, Kucera said.

“For people that don’t use it that much, that’s perfect,” Akili said.

However, Akili said those who use Internet services more should look to outside Internet access sources.

Akili said people have told him their PPP account bills were as high as $30 or more each month.

McMaster previously used the university’s PPP service, he said, and always exceeded the $7 access time period.

His bills were usually around $14, he said.

“For the same amount, I can get higher speed connection,” McMaster said.

Akili said when ISU Net opened about 10 weeks ago, they started with an offer to provide the first 100 people with $19.95 monthly access. However, he said that is now their permanent rate because the cost went down on the digital lines they use to provide access, and they are passing the savings on to their customers.

Akili said basic Internet services around the country cost that much or more for slower access.

“It’s really a better service at the same price,” Akili said.

Amesnet Inc. is another local Internet-access company that has been servicing Ames since April of 1995. Owner Doug Klokow said a couple hundred ISU students and some 1,200 people use their services.

Like ISU Net, they offer unlimited access for $19.95, although they only have 33.6K dial-up speed.

He said they hope to have 56K access by the end of the year, although details are not finalized.

He said they have been investigating 56K technology for the past year but has not seen much sense in going forward with it.

“There is not a significant performance gain,” Klokow said. “There’s somewhere in a 15 percent to an 18 percent increase in speed is all.”