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

To: Sam who wrote (8808)	3/13/1998 12:49:00 PM
From: rhet0ric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

I'm getting a good chuckle here. Your telling me that AOL can't scale its network to provide broadband services, but every other provider can? First off, it might not be AOL's burden to scale the broadband network. Perhaps WCOM, UUNet, Sprint, etc. will do that for us. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Please read my last response to steve lipson. Message 3700562 Again, I'll admit that if AOL can change their network architecture so that they aren't routing the entire Internet through a single point, then maybe they can go broadband. But even if AOL's proprietary network has the same internal bandwidth as the Internet itself (and, yes, anyone would be happy to do that for AOL), they still need to solve the bottleneck problem. And if that's what AOL is doing, then they're not in the trouble I think they're in. But even then, the cost of changing their network architecture so that is fully meshed with the Internet would be incredibly expensive, in my understanding, and would destroy their revenues for many quarters. And, as I argued before, the end result of that entire exercise would be to put them on a technological par with Yahoo and/or MCI. Second, I'm not sure why you think AOL's technology is lagging behind. The new AOL 4.0 client is totally TCP/IP compliant, will contain the latest browser, etc. The client technology is irrelevant. Broadband is a function of network architecture. AOL's network is currently able to route TCP/IP packets, so maybe I haven't been precise enough in my terminology. But their network itself is not truly on the Internet. rhet0ric