Jim Meehan and Jamie Kail are the Wayne and Garth of Chicago cyberspace.

If the two weren't so smart or were a little more preoccupied with adolescent fantasies involving Madonna, they might have merely installed a camera in the basement and started schwinging on local cable access TV.

Instead, last spring Meehan borrowed money from his parents and Kail threw in some savings to buy 14 modems and take over the Kail family basement in Hoffman Estates. The venture, called Pyrotechnics, is now 8 months old and one of the latest Internet service providers, or ISPs, to join the rush to provide individuals and businesses with on-ramps to the Internet.

That makes Meehan and Kail, both 18, perhaps two of the youngest entrepreneurs in the exploding field. ISPs buy high-speed connections to the Internet backbone--through such global wholesale providers as UUNet Technologies, Performance Systems International or Advanced Network & Services--and give access to customers who dial into the ISPs' computers via modem.

"We're both really big Netheads," said Meehan, an Arlington Heights native who's a freshman at Northwestern University. "And we thought the existing access companies were a little bit bureaucratic and profit-minded. They tend to make their individual dial-up customers take a back seat to business customers."

Kail, a freshman at the University of Evansville in Indiana, and Meehan wear beepers to class, parties, sporting events and all-night cram sessions to provide round-the-clock troubleshooting for their 150 dial-up customers.

Although they're relative newcomers, it didn't take them long to discover the biggest myth about this booming new business--that it's easy.

"Among all the startups, there's an attitude of, `If you build it, they will come and you'll make money,' " said Hoyt Hudson, 25, a New Trier High School alumnus and one of three founders of InterAccess, among the earliest and largest Chicago area ISPs, with nearly 8,000 customers.

Newer providers are quickly learning some hard lessons that the larger, more established local veterans such as MCS Net, InterAccess and WorldWide Access have been contending with for two years or more.

Billing can require complex and expensive tracking systems. Connection speed and quality can differ from service to service. Customers demand informed, responsive and available service representatives--a 7-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day proposition. And though ISPs have grown to well over a $1 billion-a-year industry nationwide, profits have been elusive, at least in these early stages of the boom.

Though few companies make substantial profits in the first year or two of operation, many Chicago-area ISPs said they were expanding so quickly that they had to continually reinvest in additional modems, servers, telephone lines and customer service representatives.

Randy Smith, a Naperville software consultant, started shopping around for a local provider when he moved to the area 2 1/2 years ago. After finally choosing one, Smith decided to share his research and post on the Internet the list of providers he found. The list (at http://www.mcs.com/-wsmith/providers.html) has been updated every month since, and its growth tells the story of what's happened to the Chicago market.

At the beginning of 1994, he listed 13 providers in Chicagoland.

By the beginning of 1995, the list had grown to 17.

Today, there are 53.

"It started with a new one every few months," said Smith, who lives in Naperville. "Now, it's several new ones each month. At some point, every person in Chicago is going to be an Internet provider if this keeps up."

In North America, the number of commercial ISPs has swelled from under a dozen just a few years ago to more than 1,800 today, according to The List, a nationwide register of ISPs that is posted on the Internet at http://thelist.com.

Reasons for the growth both locally and nationwide are obvious, according to Joel Maloff, who has been tracking the Internet access industry through his on-line Maloff Report and in his book "The Official Internet World Net.Profit," published last month.

"In the past 1 1/2 years the industry has exploded, and I think a large part of that is the ease with which people can use (Internet) services," Maloff said. "You don't need to learn new commands; all you have to do now is point and click."

Maloff said revenues among Internet service providers nationwide have grown from an estimated $119 million in March 1994 to $521 million by January 1995, and are expected to reach $2.5 billion this month.

Nationally, big providers such as Netcom long have dominated the commercial Internet access market. Now, regional providers from other areas of the country are beginning to offer local service outside their home markets, either by setting up their own local access points or by reselling other national dialup networks.

These providers often charge more per hour for network access charges than local providers, Smith said. Some also require customers to make long-distance toll calls when they have questions.

Traditional on-line service providers such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and America Online also are providing direct Internet access services, as are national phone carriers such as AT&T and MCI.

But some industry observers say Chicago is more suited to local operations with many access points rather than the national bigwigs, because phone tolls increase once a call is placed farther than 8 miles away.

"Smaller providers do have the ability to survive if they become niche-oriented," Maloff said. "The providers who opt to specialize only in Chicago, or ones that offer services such as the Internet for doctors or for lawyers, will always be able to survive."

Still, Maloff contends that the days of the one-person, low-budget operation are numbered because business and residential customers have become increasingly sophisticated and demanding about the quality of Internet service. They don't want to wait on hold for 15 minutes when they have a problem. They don't want to be called back two days later. And they don't want to get busy signals when they dial in.

Setting up Internet connections can be tricky, and some ISPs offer help. Many customers also look for help with services such as domain registration and home pages.

Just how demanding ISP customers have become can be seen in the often-feisty on-line exchange in two local newsgroups, chi.internet and chi.general. Restraint and understatement go by the wayside when customers start venting about the deficiencies of Internet access providers.

"Even if you're talking about starting a three- or four-person company, absolute minimum first-year costs are between $150,000 to $500,000," Maloff said. "Otherwise, you'll be out of business."

Janet Rogers, who co-founded Cicero-based InfoRamp last year, said she had no idea exactly how time-consuming it would be. "The demands of providing good customer service are really huge," she said, interrupting a recent evening phone conversation every few minutes to take customer calls.

Meehan agrees, and concedes that much of his learning this year has taken place outside the classroom.

"I've learned I never want a full-time job in customer service," he said. "I've had people call who want to sign up for Internet service and, eventually, after talking to them for quite a while, find out they don't even own a modem."