If you do not live near the school at which you will be taking classes, chances are every time you wish to use your student computer account from home you will incur long distance charges in order to log in. Many universities do not provide toll free modem access numbers for those students living far away from the university. In addition, a university's limited facilities for accepting modem requests from its computer account users may mean you often get a busy signal when trying to login.

An account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) (ISP) provides an alternative to both of these common problems. If you do not have an account with an ISP and are interested in getting one, a comprehensive list of providers is available. Perhaps the most important difference between a student account and an ISP is the reduced access to library databases you may suffer as a result of using an account with an ISP.

The purchase of databases such as Periodical Abstracts or ABI/Inform by university libraries usually include restrictions on their use. Many of the resources featured on the UTDL pages are restricted to that subset of UT System schools which have paid a portion of the subscription cost. Such resources are prominently labelled to alert the user to this situation.

Currently the most popular way to enforce these restrictions on use is by IP address. What this means is that a list of IP addresses which identify the computer workstations on a UT System campus or campuses is compiled and a filter set up which only allows requests coming from those specific IP addresses to use the resource. Since the computer which holds your student account sits on a UT System campus, if your school is a subscriber to the resource it will be included within the list of valid users.

On the other hand, the computer which holds your ISP account also holds the accounts of thousands of other people who have nothing to do with UT and it does not reside on a UT System campus. That computer, and your ISP account, will be blocked from using the resource.