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Friday, November 12, 2004

AOL is messed up

Recent news of AOL's restructure isn't news to me.

Earlier this year I wrote about how hard it was to make the switch to AOL's new lower priced Netscape dial-up service.

My mom tried to switch, but couldn't get it to work. She would have stayed with AOL because it's a lot easier to stay with what you know, than figure out something new.

At that time, I though it would be a smart move for AOL to offer basic dial up internet access to it's customers for a lower price, without having to make them switch to a whole new service, dial up number and email address. All they would have had to do was remove all the AOL extra features from these basic dial up service users.

They didn't do this.

So my mom switched to Comcast Broadband. When she called AOL to cancel dial up, they told her that she could keep her AOL service on her new broadband line for an additional fee.

I told her that AOL content wasn't worth an additional fee since she never used AOL content, so she canceled AOL.

Since then she's never missed AOL.

Now in today's news I just heard that AOL is dropping broadband service.
Most of AOL's 23 million subscribers receive standard dialup service for $24 a month. The company will not disclose how many customers still receive the $54 monthly broadband service, which AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley acknowledged is relatively expensive compared to other broadband pricing packages now available to consumers.
I was a bad idea in the first place.