unixgirlie
@mindspring.n
| reply to 2farfromCO7
Re: I Never Could Understand AOL
waiting 2 yrs to jump on a market in a technical industry is a VERY long time. thats enough time to let any other company kick your ass completely in a market.
dsl cost just as much in 2000 as it does now ($50), so saying only the rich people could afford it then is so very untrue. the only difference in price between then and now is install prices - many ISPs now have promotions which give discounted or free installs. |
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2farfromCO7
join:2000-10-14
Farmington, MI | reply to unixgirlie
Ok, let me ask you a question: name me an ISP that HASN'T ignored broadband. Earthlink? MSN? Who? All I know is that none of these companies makes nearly as much money off of broadband as AOL-Time Warner, if they actually turn a profit at all. |
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2farfromCO7
join:2000-10-14
Farmington, MI
| reply to unixgirlie
Fine, but what ignoring are they doing now??? 2 years ago couldn't be that late to the party. Almost nobody could get broadband of any kind in my top 10% of the wealthiest INNER INNER suburb in 2000. What did you expect them to do? What has any other non-infrastructure ISP done? Earthlink has a lot of DSL users who run on the backs of the RBOCs, but they almost surely lose money on all of them. |
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unixgirlie
@mindspring.n | reply to 2farfromCO7
sure they merged with the 2nd largest cable company . . . 2 yrs after other ISPs began offering broadband to their customers. i'd say they did some ignoring. |
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2farfromCO7
join:2000-10-14
Farmington, MI
| reply to bgraham
How can you say they ignored broadband?? They bought the 2nd largest cable company. What else can they do but that. They probably have the 2nd most broadband customers(Time Warner Cable customers) of any company in America. AOL is a dial-up with nationwide availabilty(as it is relatively easy to do that). There is no way to provide broadband access nationwide profitably in the current state of the telecom and cable industries. The only way this could be done is by running on the back of a DSL and cable company which is not profitable. No company can own nationwide broadband infrastructure in todays climate. Yes AOL will lose all of their customers outside Time Warner cities in the long-run, however there wasn't really anything they could've done about it. |
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