Response To Aol Controversy :: essays research papers

Response To AOL Controversy     The article "America On run, while you can" by Bob Woods is in all aboutthe hoopla concerning the fact that America Online, or AOL, has not been able toaccommodate its vast amount of customers. This is due to AOLs new flat rate,which substituted their original periodic deal. M whatsoever AOL users experience busysignals when trying to log on. When and if they do get on AOL, the service runsextremely slow because of the overload of users. Woods threatens that AOL will sustain many of their customers if they dont improve their resources. Othercompanies should beef-up their advertising and try to cash in by targeting theunsatisfied AOL users.In this day and age of internet use, people in any given location canchoose from at least fifteen national companies, such as sprintlink, compuserve,ameritech, erols and so on. Using these services be less expensive thanAmerica Online. Per month for unlimited use they average at around $10 to $15dollars as opposed to AOLs hefty $19.95 a month. AOLers are paying for theappealing menus, graphics and services AOL uses to drive their customers to theinternet. These same features can be located anywhere else on the net with theaid of any search device, such as infoseek, yahoo, microsoft network or web-crawler. These sites are no harder to use and they provide lots of helpfulmenus and information.     In Woods article, he states that he lives in Chicago, and AOL hasseveral different access numbers to try if one is busy. He writes that oftenwhen he has tried to log on victimization all of the functional numbers, and has stillbeen unsuccessful. This is a problem for him because he is dependent on AOL to"do the daily grind of (his) job as a reporter and PM managing editor." If Iwas not satisfied with the performance of my internet provider, which happens tobe sprintlink, I would not complain to the company. I would take my moneyelsewhere, espec ially if my job depended on using the internet. With all of theother options available, wasted time and inevitable frustration using AOL couldbe eliminated. I live in Richmond, Va., which is a fairly big urban center and have notonce been logged off or gotten a busy signal using sprintlink. And I only haveone access line available with my provider as opposed to AOLs multiple lines.I agree with Woods in the fact that people will (in most circumstances) get breach internet service and customer service with a local, smaller or more