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

To: Dr. D who wrote (3936)	1/28/1999 10:58:00 PM
From: Cosmo Daisey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

Jinx, AOL is partnering with QWEST, the soon to be largest fiber optic nationwide system, partnering with the Bells for wider bandwith. Someday we will all be on AOL because of high speed connections. The phone companies are reluctant to offer high speed at competitive rates because they would lose their lucrative T-1 line business to the cheaper connections. AOL is the answer to the Bells problem, they get some of the money and AOL gets the connections. I have four houses. The Ski house has a local ISP that charges 19.95 a month. The beach house has several local ISP's from 17.95 to 34.95 a month. The Island home has one ISP at 44.95 a month. and the mountain home has several ISP's with various prices. None of the phone numbers are local for more than one house. AOL has local numbers for all four houses at less than $25 a month total. The ISP service at all four houses would cost about 100 a month. One of the houses has a local number for ATT World net. Like I said, someday we will all be connected to AOL. cdaiseyPhD@where-am-I.com

To: Dr. D who wrote (3936)	1/28/1999 11:05:00 PM
From: Jorge	Respond to of 41369

3d....Yes, I saw it earlier...Actually this news is not of surprise at this point...It has been expected for awhile to fail (free cable access) at this point in the process. The FCC chairman, Kennard, said the FCC may revisit this issue again, and that it is a serious issue that we "should continue to monitor very closely." Also consumer advocate groups are still pushing for open access and may even petition Congress, the article said. Apparently today's "decision" does not preclude another type of FCC ruling that can still be petitioned: ........................... <<Thursday's decision ''has no immediate bearing on our request that the FCC initiate a rulemaking,'' said Andrew Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, a nonprofit Washington law firm backing open access. ''It's necessary that they come to grips with this soon.''>> ............... I don't think cable access is the "end-all" to this area of bandwidth and highspeed access...There is a lot of room to grow in the ADSL arena as well... One other thought...This newspiece came out early this morning...All the analysts knew about it after it was announced, in fact they were looking for it to probably be decided like this for some time now....This didn't stop their "Re-iterate" Strong Buys and Buys, with increases in price targets. Regards, George

To: Dr. D who wrote (3936)	1/29/1999 7:50:00 AM
From: RocketMan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

This was expected. The cablecos will go to any length to remain second- and third-tier players. Rather than open their access and make a bundle selling their services to companies such as AOL with 17M users and 50+M eyeballs, they would rather try to grow their own portals, such as ATHM. They claim this helps them to justify the large investment needed to grow and upgrade their cable services. Problem is that ATHM currently only has 350,000 subscribers, and their penetration rate is only 5% of existing cable customers. Furthermore, their own growth projections place them at something like 10M or so users by 2002, about half of what AOL has today. So they are rolling the dice and figuring they can compete with AOL, Yahoo, and all the other telephone-oriented portals while giving the competition a 2+ year lead on getting more subscribers, providing bandwidth through DSL and satellite, and perhaps striking relationships with individual cable networks. Don't forget RoadRunner is out there, and could be bought for the right price. And didn't AOL just cash out their Excite position? But it is little wonder. Cable has been overpromising and underdelivering for the last quarter century. At one time they were supposed to put the broadcast networks out of business. The only reason they have been as successful as they have in getting into the internet is because the phone companies have been even more incompetent. But the phone companies lately seem to be waking up at a faster rate than the cable companies.