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AOL to Raise Dialup Prices
United Bimmer writes "America Online has announced that it's going to raise the price on dialup users in an attempt to encourage them to upgrade to broadband. The new rates will near $26 a month, already drastically higher than the market norm for dialup access. This will bring the dialup prices to almost the exact same per month as broadband depending on your plan. However through this, they do still offer an unadvertised lower price for those who can't get or don't want broadband can request lower-priced plans, including an unadvertised offering of about $18 with a one-year commitment."
AOL is probably leasing bandwidth from your local telco. As far as I know, AOL doesn't have their own infrastructure.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I saw this article from msn earlier.
From that article: "We're doing this because a majority of AOL members will be able to get high-speed connections and access the AOL service for this new price," spokeswoman Anne Bentley said Tuesday. "Hopefully it's an encouragement for them to get high-speed connections."
Although AOL has been shifting its focus to providing free articles, video and other materials on its ad-supported Web sites, the company sees paid broadband accounts as key to making that strategy work.
AOL believes broadband will help boost usage and hence advertising. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, those with broadband at home are 52 percent more likely than dial-up subscribers to use the Internet on a given day, and the typical broadband user spends about 23 percent more time online daily.
They're basically trying to get more people using high speed connections to get more people online and using their services where they get more money for their services and for advertising. It's just a shift to more of an ad-based revenue stream. Makes sense.
www.joshferguson.org
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Heaven forbid I be labeled 'informative' for this.
For now, the local Telco is forced to sell at a discount. This is the same way Speakweasy and other DSL ISP's work. Nobody runs copper to the home for DSL. Even Verizon is switching to Fiber for the last mile these days.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Hmmm...let me see....I have a 3Mbit DSL connection giving me downloads at over 300 kb/sec. Err....yep, that's slow. Jeez, there's hardly any difference between this and the 3kb/sec speed I got with dial-up. You're right - let me cancel straight away - I'm being duped.
Dude - get this into your techno-head: the difference between dial-up and DSL can be huge to people interested in using the Internet. The physical reality, or layer, is irrelevent to the majority of these people. They got care a rat's ass about the FCC and spectrum usage.
"I dont think that DSL should even be considered as broadband". In your universe it probably isn't.
Fewer AOL users... "users" are countable. 'Less' is used when there is an uncountable quantity.
-- Slackware Geek
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy. - Robert Heinlein
> I'm not sure how they do their broadband, but it must be much less expensive than maintaining massive analog dial-up pools.
The infastructure needed for modem pools is massive and can't easily be consolidated and/or distributed like broadband routing setups. It's like having to maintain a fleet of 20,000 mopeds instead of a dozen big rigs. Broadband just has a bigger economy of scale.
I probably use the account once every three or four months at the most, and I even then I access the AOL network through my own separate broadband ISP account. The only time in the past dozen years I've used it for non-testing for any period of time is when the three hurricanes came through central Florida and I was without my broadband connection for a few days.
AOL isn't sparing anyone from the price increase. I *was* paying their obscure $4/mo+hourly plan which I considered fair. But, I received the following e-mail from them the other day:
As you can read in the letter, they're basically justifying raising my monthly fee for items of their service that I never or rarely use or benefit from: reliable Internet service, security features, exclusive content, member service and support.
And now they'll be getting $83/year (nearly all of which is pure profit) from me -- a developer trying to support users of their crappy service. I realize it's not a lot, but that doesn't make it feel like less of a ripoff.
Way to go AOL. You're making it really easy to just give up on you completely.