Can someone please clarify how AOL works vs. using an ISP and the straight internet?
The reason I ask this is that I gave my 73 year father an old computer (his first) and set him up on AOL (I am long AOL, after all). Using AOL on that computer seemed to work much, much faster than using the internet via what was my ISP, BellSouth. Conversely, when I tried to access the internet through AOL, or "off-AOL," if you will, the pages were excruciatingly slow, to the point where I told my father we weren't going to do this anymore and I plugged in my laptop and searched for the non-AOL sites with that machine.
Did this occur because, in essence, AOL is a proprietary, closed loop system such as if you were to dial-up access your local bank via modem, which works exceedingly fast? So as long as you stay within the AOL system (and its partners) access is going to be great/fast, but when you go outside the system into the pure internet, access is going to be slow, slower in fact than using an alternate ISP?
Thanks to anyone who can shed light on this. The issue is at least tangentially related to the access/speed issue because I was very impressed at how fast the 56K AOL pages loaded vs. my 56K BellSouth internet page loads. It may be that AOL account holders may be very satisfied with their access speed because it is better than using a pure "internet" service provider. |
