AOL may offer free high-speed Internet – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Time Warner Inc.’s (NYSE:TWX – news) AOL unit may offer its full menu of services, including e-mail, free of charge to anyone with a high-speed Internet connection, The Wall Street Journal said on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.AOL could give up as much as $2 billion in subscription revenue if a gambit aimed at boosting the Internet service’s advertising revenue goes ahead, the Journal said.
Under the plan, AOL would stop charging subscription fees for users with high-speed Internet access or a dial-up service from another provider, the newspaper said.
Finally they see it.
I don’t think they do see it. Even if AOL did offer free high speed Internet I would rather pay $40 than to have their software on my PC. They’re a disgrace to the industry with their tactics.
I think they are just going to focus on web based content and get away from the whole browser/software setup they have now. They do occasionally have some decent content on there.
It is advertisor ridden garbage as far as I’m concerned. I’ve cleaned off several PC’s where AOL has automatically installed their POS software and has slowed things down to an almost unusable state. Couple that with the horror stories of canceling an existing AOL account, I’m not sure why anyone would want to do business with them, free or not.
AOL is spiraling down an inevitable path to self-destruction and AOL sees that the only way that they can survive is to make a huge entrance by offering free broadband for the masses. Keep in mind that this service isn’t free to them and they’ll want compensated for such. What they don’t tell you is that they’ll increase the amount of advertising garbage in their software for free broadband.
They’re not going to simply lay a big fat pipe at your doorstep and let you surf the net 24×7 doing whatever you damn well please. They’re going to get their compensation one way or another and they’ll do this by making their existing software even worse, not get rid of it.