Internet access
Common methods of home access include dial-up, landline broadband (over coaxial cable, fibre optic or copper wires), Wi-Fi, satellite and cell phones.
Public places to use the Internet include libraries and Internet cafes, where computers with Internet connections are available. There are also Internet access points in many public places like airport halls, in some cases just for brief use while standing. Various terms are used, such as "public Internet kiosk", "public access terminal", and "Web payphone". Many hotels now also have public terminals, though these are usually fee based.
Wi-Fi provides wireless access to computer networks, and therefore can do so to the Internet itself. Hotspots providing such access include Wi-Fi-cafes, where a would-be user needs to bring their own wireless-enabled devices such as a laptop or PDA. These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based. A hotspot need not be limited to a confined location. The whole campus or park, or even the entire city can be enabled. Grassroots efforts have led to wireless community networks. Commercial WiFi services covering large city areas are in place in London, San Francisco, Philadelphia and other cities, including Toronto by the end of 2006. The Internet can then be accessed from such places as a park bench.[1]
Apart from Wi-Fi, there have been experiments with proprietary mobile wireless networks like Ricochet, various high-speed data services over cellular or mobile phone networks, and fixed wireless services

In formal usage, Internet is traditionally written with a capital first letter. The Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the World Wide Web Consortium, and several other Internet-related organizations all use this convention in their publications. In English grammar, proper nouns are capitalised.
Most newspapers, newswires, periodicals, and technical journals also capitalize the term. Examples include the New York Times, the Associated Press, Time, The Times of India, Hindustan Times and Communications of the ACM.
In other cases, the first letter is often written small (internet), as it is argued that this is the correct form. However, the term internet with a small i refers in network technologies to any interconnected local area networks, whereas the Internet with a capital i is the specific name of the largest internet on Earth; but there are others.
Since 2000, a significant number of publications have switched to using internet. Among them are The Economist, the Financial Times, the London Times, and the Sydney Morning Herald. As of 2005, most publications using internet appear to be located outside of North America although one American news source, Wired News, has adopted the lowercase spelling.

The Internet has been a major source of leisure since before the World Wide Web, with entertaining social experiments such as MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much of the main traffic. Today, many Internet forums have sections devoted to neta; short cartoons in the form of Flash movies are also popular.
The pornography and gambling industries have both taken full advantage of the World Wide Web, and often provide a significant source of advertising revenue for other Web sites. Although many governments have attempted to put restrictions on both industries' use of the Internet, this has generally failed to stop their widespread popularity.
One main area of leisure on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of leisure creates communities, bringing people of all ages and origins to enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing games to online gambling. This has revolutionized the way many people interact and spend their free time on the Internet.
Online gaming began with services such as GameSpy and MPlayer, which players of games would typically subscribe to. Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of gameplay or certain games. With the release of Diablo by Blizzard Entertainment, gamers were treated to a built in online game service that was free of charge over Battle.net. With Blizzard's next game, StarCraft, the gaming world saw an explosion in the numbers of players using the Internet to play multi-player games. StarCraft may have been the first non-MMO game in which most players utilized the online gameplay as opposed to the single-player gameplay.
Many use the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their enjoyment and relaxation. As discussed above, there are paid and unpaid sources for all of these, using centralised servers and distributed, peer-to-peer technologies. Discretion is needed as some of these sources take more care over the original artists' rights and over copyright laws than others.
Many use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book holidays and to find out more about their random ideas and casual interests.
People use chat, messaging and email to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously had pen pals. Social networking web sites like Friends Reunited and many others like them also put and keep people in contact for their enjoyment.
Cyberslacking has become a serious drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spends 57 minutes a day surfing the web at work, according to a study by Peninsula Business Services

Many computer scientists see the Internet as a "prime example of a large-scale, highly engineered, yet highly complex system" (Willinger, et al). The Internet is extremely heterogeneous. (For instance, data transfer rates and physical characteristics of connections vary widely.) The Internet exhibits "emergent phenomena" that depend on its large-scale organization. For example, data transfer rates exhibit temporal self-similarity.
The Internet has also become a large market for companies; some of the biggest companies today have grown by taking advantage of the efficient nature of low-cost advertising and commerce through the Internet; also known as e-commerce. It is the fastest way to spread information to a vast amount of people simultaneously. The Internet has also subsequently revolutionized shopping—for example; a person can order a CD online and receive it in the mail within a couple of days, or download it directly in some cases. The Internet has also greatly facilitated personalized marketing which allows a company to market a product to a specific person or a specific group of people moreso than any other advertising medium.
Examples of personalized marketing include online communities such as Myspace, Friendster, and others which thousands of Internet users join to advertise themselves and make friends online. Many of these users are young teens and adolescents ranging from 13 to 25 years old. In turn, when they advertise themselves they advertise intrests and hobbies, which online marketing companies can use as information as to what those users will purchase online, and advertise their own companies' products to those users.

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