Discourse Chronicle

Broadband subscribers are far more valuable to AOL than dial-up subscribers for a host of reasons, Redling said. “Customers stay with us longer when they move to high speed,” he explained. “And with advertisers, we’re seeing such a move into rich media on our sites, so high speed opens the way for many more opportunities.”

This reasoning, however, raises the question of why AOL waited until now to push broadband. “I was waiting for this sort of deal to happen over three years ago,” remarked Joseph Laszlo, broadband research director at Jupiter Research. “AOL has tried a whole bunch of strategies–trying to buy access wholesale and reselling to subscribers, then they moved in the direction of bring your own service, where they told consumers to bring their own service.”

category: Popular Culture, Technology