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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Tallant who wrote (26751)	7/24/1999 9:41:00 PM
From: Vendit™	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41369

Tom I'm not sure if this a positive or a negative but here goes.>> I bought my first PC in 1996........soon afterwards I downloaded a program from icq.com Two years later I see that AOL has bought them out. They call it ICQ or AOL Instant Messaging. I do not use AOL as I am not a person who likes boundaries. I do not want to navigate the web through a portal as I find them slow. I have and pay for 2 ISP connections and have by-passed the software of them both. The bottom line is you do not need AOL to use IM. On the other hand if you use ICQ you are an AOL hit. AOL wins either way. The same can be said for free US ISPs. They use Netscape as their portal onto the web. AOL owning Netscape wins this battle as well. Now we have cable vs wireline.................the Hughes deal trumps that and all others. Vendit

To: Tom Tallant who wrote (26751)	7/24/1999 10:11:00 PM
From: Marvin Mansky	Respond to of 41369

Part 2: Investment Summary AOL reported strong fiscal fourth quarter (ending June) earnings of $0.13 per share on a fully-taxed basis, better than our estimate of $0.10 and First Call consensus of $0.11 per share. In addition, total revenue of $1.38 billion outpaced our estimate of $1.32 billion due to stronger than expected results across all categories. Especially surprising was the strong growth in the Enterprise Solutions business, which was the fastest growing revenue segment, up 17% sequentially versus our estimate of 6% sequential growth. We believe this strong improvement is a testament to the help of Sun Microsystems and the leverage provided by AOL's 17.6 million subscriber base. AOL continued to demonstrate its network efficiency by increasing gross margins by 130 basis points to 46.2%, due to the strong growth in high-margin advertising revenue and AOL's ability to leverage its costs over a shared infrastructure. Subscriber growth of 755,000 was in line with our estimate of 750,000, but at the low end of the company's guidance - between 750,000 and 850,000 - due to competition in the U.K. from free ISPs. However, the number of new North American AOL subscribers was up 31% from last year, adding 686,000 new North American subscribers (a record for the fourth quarter) in what is a seasonally weak quarter. Overall, we remain very bullish on the core AOL business and maintain our Buy rating. AOL Announces Another DSL Partnership Yesterday, AOL announced a strategic alliance with Ameritech to provide broadband Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) access to AOL subscribers. As part of the agreement, Ameritech will accelerate the installation of DSL technology into its phone switching centers so that it will be able to serve 8 million homes by 2001. It will begin roll out of the service in early 2000. This marks the third agreement that AOL has made with regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) to deploy high-speed AOL service over DSL. In January it signed an agreement with Bell Atlantic to roll out the service in the late summer and in March it signed with SBC Communications to roll out the service in the fall. The combination of the three agreements brings AOL's footprint of total homes in its DSL footprint to 55 million in the U.S. This is impressive given that we estimate Excite@Home's footprint in North America to be 58 million homes (its worldwide footprint is 67 million homes). We estimate that by 2001, AOL could have as many as 40 million upgraded homes in this footprint capable of receiving DSL service. This puts it in line with cable, which we estimate will have 39 million homes with upgraded cable plant in its footprint that are capable of receiving high-speed Internet access over the cable lines.