(Excerpt from the Fresno Bee article "No free ride when surfing the Internet" by Benjamin Seto, July 17 1995) ...Daniel Birchall, a Burlington, N.J.-based consultant specializing in the Internet, offered these tips on choosing a service: Connectivity. Find the provider with the fastest and most-direct access to the Internet. More bandwidth - the capacity level of data travel - is a key for efficiently surfing the Net. Most providers have at least one "T1" line - the equivalent of 24 phone lines. "A good provider would have two or three T1 lines," said Birchall. "Each line should go to a different backbone of the Internet so if one network goes down, the whole ISP [Internet service provider] won't be affected." Modem radio. Some companies might not disclose this information, but Birchall said it is worth finding out the provider's ratio of users to modems. Each caller is connected to a modem that routes the user on his