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Technology Stocks : America On-Line: will it survive ...? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Craig Richards who wrote (8692)	3/9/1998 8:49:00 PM
From: Investor-ex!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

Hi Craig, I think AOL has some sort of 2-3 (longer?) year agreement with WorldCom (to whom, I believe, AOL has transferred its communications hardware responsibilities as part of the CompuServe deal) to provide and maintain the hardware for AOL's ISP function at some sort of pre-negotiated rate. I would sure like to read this agreement. In any event, there must be some sort of provision in the agreement for increasing capacity going forward. Whether those contractual increased capacity costs are reasonable or not would be the question. From all of AOL's bitching about the increasing "burden" of their average client, I would theorize that things are not working out according to plan. However, this is purely idle speculation on my part. Furthermore, if a new bandwidth-enhancing technology suddenly becomes prevalent across the internet, AOL's current agreement with WorldCom will likely create something of an impediment in attracting or retaining performace-oriented clientele. However, as this currently appears to be something like 0.1% of AOL's client base at any one time, concerns in this regard are probably negligible.