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

To: Tim Kenney who wrote (8864)	3/17/1998 12:05:00 AM
From: Investor-ex!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13594

Tim, Beats me. Maybe they would rather make a nice fat margin rather than break-even (MCI?) or lose money (AOL?) on ISP service. Maybe they're just dipping their collective toes in the water for now, and have plans for dropping prices at a later date. Actually, aside from being somewhat overly-cautious monopolists, I think the baby-bells are rather torn by the whole internet experience at this point in telecom deregulation. After all, it's mostly their local circuits that are being tied up when people stay on-line for hours on end, all the while on a flat-rate local phone plan. (Does anyone really believe the internet would have amounted to much more than a hill of beans without flat-rate local phone service?) From a baby-bell's perspective, offering internet access must be a bit like tossing pints of gasoline on a roaring fire. However, I believe the bells are slowly coming to the conclusion that they have to be involved in the internet, and soon, or gathering customers and operational experience will be all the more difficult further down the road. Why? Because once the baby-bells begin offering long distance, the need to offer internet access as part of a bundle will become paramount. That's what I think they're eventually shooting for (as are the long distance companies and maybe the cable companies too) -- a package that includes local, long distance, internet, e-mail, cable(?), home-security(??), electric power(???), etc(????) all at a steeply discounted price compared to the individual pieces. Incidentally, where will AOL's current configuration fit into this scenario, should it come to pass, without the physical infrastructure to enable it?