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Closing This Summer: Verizon To Scoop Up AOL For $4.4 Billion
MojoKid writes with this excerpt from Hot Hardware: We learned this weekend that AOL's dial-up business still has over 2 million customers who pay on average just under $21 per month for service. Regardless of how strange that seems to those of us that salivate over the prospects of gigabit Internet, folks are still clinging to 56k modems are adding millions to AOL's bottom line. However, also recall that AOL has a massive digital advertising platform with a heavy focus on the mobile sector and also owns a wealth of popular web destinations including Engadget, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post. With this in mind, it shouldn't be too surprising that Verizon has offered AOL a marriage proposal. Verizon is acquiring AOL for an estimated $50 per share, which brings the total value of the transaction to $4.4 billion. Here are stories from The New York Times, NBC News, and NPR on the proposed sale, which it's worth noting isn't yet final, and is subject to regulatory approval.
Verizon is rolling backwards in technology. First, they stopped rolling out new FiOS. Then, they forced their remaining customers onto Uverse with a flawed modem. Now, they're giving up and rolling all the way back to dial-up. Probably gaining mostly customers who chose AOL so they wouldn't have to deal with Verizon.
Seriously, the NVG510 modem they rolled out for Uverse has a flaw that blocks the Internet from working for hours or days at a time and redirects all web traffic to an error page. There is a workaround involving rooting the modem and changing some settings and DNS servers, but the only firmware updates Verizon has put out are to block people from rooting the modem.