Why use AOL instead of DSL?

[rich at richardwiggins.com]

Canada is probably quite a ways ahead of the United States on DSL deployment.  In the U.S., the last year has seen a near-meltdown of the Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) industry.  Even in metropolitan areas where DSL is available, many neighborhoods are not served due to technical or business reasons.

Even if DSL or cable modems were available everywhere, the going rate of $40 to $50 per month is lots higher than AOL's rate of $23 or so for dialup.  A huge percentage would choose the lower fee and the familiarity of AOL.

And some people use AOL over high speed.  That may really make you want to rant, but it's true.  :-)

Bottom line: any content provider serving a large audience can't dismiss AOL users.

/rich


> Interesting idea.  Perhaps it's the bitter, apathetic, system administrator
> side of me, but I don't care how my pages look for AOL or WebTV users. As
> many people have pointed out, know your user base.  Mine/our Library's isn't
> AOL or WebTV.
> 
>   <rant>I can't for the life of me figure out why people use AOL,
>   WebTV etc. when very reasonably priced DSL exists in most markets,
>   providing at _least_ 10 times the speed</rant>
> 
> I'm moderately interested in how it looks for Mac users, but not nearly
> enough to pay the $15 NetMechanic wants (for each use!).  With the explosion
> of open source and free software, it seems the world (and I think especially
> the academic community with it's ever shrinking budget) has become quite
> "frugal" (read "cheap").
> 
> I read a bit of the description for the NetMechanic thing, but as soon as I
> saw they wanted money, I left.  I'll stick with trying to produce valid HTML
> and CSS with the help of (free) tools from WDG and W3C, and not worry too
> much about buggy and outdated browsers.
> 
> - Darryl
> 
>  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>   Darryl Friesen, B.Sc., Programmer/Analyst    Darryl.Friesen at usask.ca
>   Education & Research Technology Services,     http://gollum.usask.ca/
>   Department of Computing Services,
>   University of Saskatchewan
>  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

_____________________________________________________

Richard Wiggins
Consulting, Writing, and Lecturing on Internet Topics
rich at richardwiggins.com  http://richardwiggins.com