To thread,
Change the name to T.Com and we're off.... ;-)
Proud to Be Second: AT&T Corp. is trying hard to keep up with the Joneses on the Internet. Ma Bell, eager to shed its image as an old-fashioned telephone company, has announced that it is once again offering unlimited Internet use for its WorldNet subscribers, at $21.95 a month.
Last year, AT&T was forced to curtail the all-you-can-surf plan because it didn't have enough system capacity. Now, the company has added more capacity and is offering subscribers a host of new features. Want multiple e-mail addresses? AT&T is offering six (one more than America Online Inc.); 30 megabytes of free space for personal Web pages, and access to AT&T WorldNet e-mail from remote locations. It has even adopted a "You Have Mail" refrain when users sign on.
Flush with one million new Internet users from its purchase of International Business Machines Corp.'s global network, plus an estimated 300,000 subscribers from the Internet-over-cable service of AtHome Corp., AT&T says it will have almost three million total Internet users once the acquisitions are complete. This would put it ahead of Microsoft Corp. "At this point, that's a solid No. 2 position," says Dan Schulman, president of AT&T's WorldNet Service. "We now have a critical mass of subscribers." AOL has more than 14 million subscribers; the last time Microsoft released numbers, it reported 2.3 million.
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