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

To: Brian Malloy who wrote (2660)	1/15/1999 9:12:00 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

The ADSL service through Bell is a "best effort service", meaning that there are no guarantees on uptime or bandwidth. Hi Brian, That's your basic "cover your ass" statement made by the company. Similar to all the caveats you read in a prospectus ... "past performance is not indicative of future returns, yada yada yada." Any pipe is going to have bandwith problems when enough people use it -- cable included. Have friends that use cable modems that get bogged down during heavy traffic hours. Ditto ISDN and dial up. DSL will use the same copper, and while you can squeeze more K out, that doesn't mean you can squeeze more users in and maintain the same output. Regardless, DSL and cable will be faster then dialup. As for the $20 service, remember that it is on top of the AOL subscriber charges. So your looking at $40+. Of course, that doesn't include installation and network card, etc. S.

To: Brian Malloy who wrote (2660)	1/15/1999 1:41:00 PM
From: MGV	Respond to of 41369

Shared Cable v. xDSL (From Jim Seymour column in 1/15/99 thestreet.com) While cable modems can in theory deliver up to 10Mbps, maybe even 30Mbps, to your home PC, in practice they're typically limited by your PC, your network card, and cable outfits' sloth to about a twelfth or fifteenth of that -- on average, typical speeds of 700Kbps-800Kbps. Moreover, you share the available bandwidth with some unknown number of neighbors with cable-Internet-access service, whom the cable company has thrown into what they call a node with you. If no one else is on, you're likely to get the full 700Kbps or so available in your neighborhood. If there are several other Netheads in you neighborhood, and all are using the Web at the same time, your access speed can slow to as little as 50Kbps or so -- conceivably, even less.

To: Brian Malloy who wrote (2660)	1/15/1999 4:59:00 PM
From: trouthead	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

Both cable and DSL have constraining factors. But they are different for each. Cables constraining factor is that you are sharing a single line with many users. DSL is the distance from the CO and the quality of the copper to your house. DSL also has several different flavors. The slowest is what is being offered because at this time it is more robust. But you can get, under perfect conditions, with the DMT flavor of DSL up to 8 mb down and 1 to 2 mb up. Of course both are constrained by the backbone of the net. This is one area where ATHM's network replication strategy helps. Hope this clears a few questions, jb