AOL Subscriber Defections Continue, Top 1 Million

[Seeker of Truth]

AOL Subscriber Defections Continue, Top 1 Million

By David A. Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 4, 2003; Page E01


America Online has lost more than 1 million dial-up customers since the dramatic decline in its subscriber base began late last year, sources familiar with the figures said yesterday.

The Dulles-based firm is rapidly losing customers to NetZero and other lower-priced bare-bones Internet services, as well as to higher-priced high-speed cable and telephone providers.

America Online's problems are the "one negative" at AOL Time Warner Inc. these days, according to Wayne H. Pace, the corporation's chief financial officer. Speaking at a media conference this week, Pace said the falloff in subscribers is much steeper than AOL had projected, and he said the only way for the Internet unit to meet cash-flow targets for the year is to cut costs relentlessly.

"We're taking a lot of money out of network costs," Pace said, describing the expense of operating the computers and phone lines used by the online service. "We are still investing in the new products and services that we think will take care of the AOL business."

Customers are fleeing the $23.90-per-month AOL service for low-cost providers led by United Online Inc., which owns NetZero, Juno and other bare-bones services that charge just $9.95 a month for Internet access. While America Online is shrinking, United Online is adding subscribers at an annual rate of 50 percent.


More @ washingtonpost.com (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10134-2003Jun3.html?nav=hptop_tb)

[DoctorDoom]

AOHell is okay for total newbies, but for anyone with a little experience on the Net, its limitations become apparent. Priority file types, limited attachment size, random cutoffs, and software that is horribly invasive on a puter do not endear AOHell to anyone who has outgrown his Web diapers. Some stay with it because they really don't know about or care about its minuses, but evidently it is starting to piss people off in mass quantities.

My recommendation to anyone who asks is to find a local ISP and support a small business in their community. The service is usually excellent, there are very few busy signals, and they don't drain the wallet.

AOHell is another example of the "We're big and you're dirt" mindset, and it's taking its toll. If it can't compete, let it fold. That's business.

[CaliGirl]

I am one of those million. http://freeconservatives.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon16.gif I left because of being kicked off line, or not being able to get connected. I was with them for many years.

[Radical-Conservative]

[ QUOTE ]
DoctorDoom said:


My recommendation to anyone who asks is to find a local ISP and support a small business in their community. The service is usually excellent, there are very few busy signals, and they don't drain the wallet.

[/ QUOTE ]

The only problem with that Doc is for people that want DSL ISDN etc. many local ISP's don't offer them

[JonECat]

I am on Comcast Broadband and it works just fine. A little pricey, but you get what you pay for. I was on AOL for the first couple of months that I started using the internet, it was fine for that time but it got old rather quickly.

[DoctorDoom]

[ QUOTE ]
The only problem with that Doc is for people that want DSL ISDN etc. many local ISP's don't offer them

[/ QUOTE ]
Mayhaps, but 4 out of 5 Internet users are still connecting via dialup.

[ QUOTE ]
Dialup access is still the norm for most Americans that access the Internet, with 80 percent of residential Internet users connecting though dialup. But the survey found that from August 2000 to September 2001, residential use of broadband Internet access doubled from 4 percent to 11 percent of all individuals, and from 11 to 20 percent of Internet users.

[/ QUOTE ]
U.S. Internet Population Continues to Grow (http://www.isp-planet.com/research/2002/us_020208.html)

Prediction: the constant increase in new users and broadband connections is going to result in chaos, because the Internet's infrastructure is not expanding nearly fast enough to compensate for the growth.

[Rhino]

I have yet to find a local ISP that does not offer ISDN, and very few that don't have broadband, at least not in the last six or seven years. First, the ability to use ISDN is almost exclusively the province of the phone company, not the ISP. Second, DSL is extremely similar in that the biggest roadblock is digital capable switches within the local telecommunications network. In either case the requirements for the ISP are quite small, at least in an equipment sense. The phone company bears the brunt of equipment upgrades, and once one company 'goes digital' in a neighborhood, the others practically do too by default. If you have a local ISP not offering ISDN or DSL, that is a choice they made rather than a limitation imposed upon them. They may have made that choice because DSL usually requires a bigger tech support team, most of their customers are in areas where digital is not available via the phone company, or some other reason unique to them. Regardless, there is a market shift going on (when is there not?), and these ISPs will indeed offer such services eventually, or they'll go out of business.

[Radical-Conservative]

The isp's that offer broadband are few and far between around here

[Seeker of Truth]

Wit & Wisdom

The AOL Conspiracy
by Dawn Braun

The minute the seal on the shiny cd case is cracked, they've got you. The scandal that is America Online (AOL) will reach beyond your computer- and right into your accounts taking money willy-nilly. There's no one to talk to. Even the real voice on the other end is confused but nevertheless unable to help resolve your AOL problem. Somehow you are under contract to have a bazillion dollars taken out, but the contract itself is confidential.

This is one of many specific cases listed at www.screwedcentral.com (http://www.screwedcentral.com), a free non-profit community service website for posting consumer complaints. A message-board service offers advice to victims of such scams. In reading the responses with AOL, there was some complaints over the Better Business Bureau (BBB) - mainly that AOL is buying off the BBB to prevent their company from being added to the list. Unfortunately, this is not a filed claim, so it's up to the reader to decide if the complaint is valid. When searching the BBB's site for reports on AOL's practices, there is mention of AOL having membership, but no negative reports exist.

Calls that come in from AOL subscribers are referred to their Fraud Department. All too often, someone had tried to cancel but was instead offered two more free months of AOL online service, and naively accepted. In short, the reps for AOL are incapable of respecting the word 'no', and callers are unable to mean 'no' as well. It is difficult to call this as harassment and make it stick. More importantly, unless the conversation is being recorded, it's tough to prove how the transaction progressed. Of course the customer has no recourse - if a credit card number was given out, AOL has permission to charge the account. The burden of proof is on the customer.

How does a company with such practices stay in business? Buying phone and mailing lists are easy enough to acquire and it's all perfectly legal. Even though it cannot be proven, AOL has the ability to send their products to a specific group. Prime poverty age is between 18-29 and cheap Internet access is a must have for college students. Victims of the AOL scam may not fall within that range, though that is the largest demographic willing to spend their money, and anything free is considered fair game. How AOL can continue it's billing practices remains a conspiracy. There are plenty of references to a class action suit stating that AOL's version 5.0 changes PC's settings in ways that make it impossible to uninstall or reconnect using an alternative Internet Service Providers- but nothing about how people are harassed into keeping their accounts active with AOL.

Consumers who believe that AOL follows the same rules as the rest of the world will remain victims of their ruthless tactics. Buyer beware, this giant will fall, along with the money that has been siphoned off under consumer's noses for years.


Source - valleysoapbox.com (http://www.valleysoapbox.com/WitandWisdomAOLConspiracyDB0603.htm)

[DoctorDoom]

[ QUOTE ]
I have yet to find a local ISP that does not offer ISDN, and very few that don't have broadband, at least not in the last six or seven years.

[/ QUOTE ]
Both of mine do. However, the fact that they offer it does not mean that all or even the majority of their subscribers can get it. I cannot.

The POTS is the barrier. The maximum distance from a CO that DSL will work is about four miles. And, out in God's country where there isn't a direct connection between the CO and the user, 28.8K is the maximum, never mind DSL, ISDN, et al.

The fact is that the POTS was never intended for data. It was designed for Maudy discussing apple pie recipes with Matilda. In human communication, the brain can filter out line imperfections and noise. The computer can't. Ergo, dial-up connections involve sending data in chunks and then verifying that each chunk is received correctly before going on to the next one. This compensates for line issues, but at the expense of speed.

As long as the end user relies on a couple of twisted fine copper wires bundled together with dozens or hundreds of others, and feeding through intermediate equipment between him and the CO, dial-up will never be fast. And, the large majority of users are still on dial-up.

The Net users should be damn glad of that. Imagine the chaos on the Web if every US user could connect via DSL and started watching streaming video.

[nosferatuscoffin]

To dovetail with with what our Good Doctor had to say, having everyone connected via broadband would slow the overall net backbones even worse than it has been slowed over the last few years with the explosion of spam and the absolute choking of mail servers nowadays

For the first time, the majority of e-mail that companies receive is spam, by a 51-49% ratio. (I am forgetting the source for this, as I heard it yesteday on our local tech radio show, Computers 2K3, which by the way, is a HOOT, if any of you in NC can pick up 850 the Buzz AM, in Raleigh).

As for POTS, it is going to be a good 5-10 years at least before the old copper wires are ripped out and replaced by high-performance fiber optics. Until then, your only choices are seeing if you can get satellite, live with 28.8kps or move to an area that offers broadband.

That is one place where Europe has the US beat hands down. They started getting rid of their POTS lines and putting in fiber a lot sooner than we did. Not to mention most networks in Europe are wireless and they adopted cell phones a lot earlier than we did as well. Of course, you have to put up with a mirowave dish within eyesight every 20 yards.

[DoctorDoom]

[ QUOTE ]
For the first time, the majority of e-mail that companies receive is spam, by a 51-49% ratio.

[/ QUOTE ]
That I can believe. 95% of what I find in the inbox is spam, including ads such as, "Broadcast Email Advertise to 35.6 Million People - FREE".

Filtering is becoming a cat and mouse game. If you set filters to delete certain words such as "****", the spammers deliberately avoid it by using "f.u.c.k" or something similar, replacing "i" with the numeral "1", etcetera.

There appears to be a new utility for spammers that randomly generates names in the From field, which disallows filtering that field for spam.

And, for those like me who look at the message source of suspect emails rather than opening them, there's another technique that fills the message with garbage characters that don't show up in actual viewing, but make it very difficult to read directly. They want the recipient to open it, because it talks with their server and verifies that the email addy is valid. It then goes on a list and the spam increases.

It's a constant war.