As a non-techie, I am trying to understand the problems you see with AOL's system.
I worked for awhile at GTE Internetworking, formerly BBN, which is one of the companies that provides network services for AOL, and resells AOL's modem banks. My knowledge comes from that experience, and from related experience as a Web developer. My technical understanding may in fact be wrong, and I welcome corrections.
I'll try to give a general description of the AOL network and the Internet, how AOL connects to the Internet, and why the problems with AOL's connection to the Internet will eventually kill AOL.
Picture the Internet and AOL as two non-overlapping circles, of which the Internet is much, much bigger. Then picture a single point linking the two circles. Then picture a small circle within the larger circle, which I'll call aol.com.
AOL connects to the Internet at a single point, in Reston, VA. That's the point linking the two networks. Every AOL user who visits the Internet has to go through that point. The "point" can be made large, with huge bandwidth and tons of powerful servers, but ultimately it's a single point. In comparison, people logging on to the Internet surf through it from wherever they are, connecting through whatever route is easiest.
So, for example, say you have two users who are next door neighbours in San Francisco, and they want to visit the Apple Web site nearby. The ISP user logs on, and their requests are routed locally till they get to the site, then back. The AOL user, by contrast, first logs on to AOL, connects to Virginia, which then connects to Apple, and back through Virginia to San Francisco.
This doesn't make much of a difference if it's just a static page they're looking at. But if it's an intensive page, it makes a big difference. And if it's streaming content, it makes a huge difference.
Many high-end Web content providers are starting to use a Cisco product called a Distributed Director. What that does is it enables the provider to put the same content on multiple servers, and then directs users to whichever server is closest. AOL will never be able to do that under their current architecture.
In the long run, then, the Internet will be able to scale almost infinitely, while AOL will always be constrained by an inferior architecture--unless it bails on its own network and becomes a true ISP, and presumably puts all its content on aol.com.
To bring this back to relevance, the inferior architecture of AOL won't make a difference until its inferiority becomes obvious to users. My guess is that that will only happen when there are high-bandwidth, highly popular Web sites that AOL users can't get to. They'll talk to their neigbour, who connects through a regular ISP, and who can visit the site. Then their perception will match the reality, and they will understand that AOL isn't the Internet. The user base will shrink, AOL's revenues will crash, and the stock will nosedive.
rhet0ric |
