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AOL Users to Pay 10% Premium
(For Less than Premium Service?)

by Ken Fermoyle

When America Online upped its monthly rate to $21.95, Wall Street cheered and bumped AOL stock up more than 10% to an all-time high of $112. I cheered for a different reason: Now that its customers must pay a 10% premium for poorer service than many other ISPs offer, perhaps fewer people will jump, or remain, on the AOL bandwagon.

This could make cyberspace life much easier for them. I know having to send e-mail to fewer AOL addresses would make my life easier!

Much has been made of the comfortable interface AOL provides but every survey of ISP performance I've seen during the past year shows AOL well down the list in terms of dial-up availability and high in "wait time" generally. It ranked at the bottom, a poor 12th, in a study of business users by TeleChoice, Inc. and reported in Inter@ctive Week.

AOL's overall score was less than half that of the top five ISPs, and more than 100 points lower (226 vs. 329) than the 11th place finisher, CompuServe. (Interestingly, AOL bought CompuServe in early February.) Since the study indicated that respondents' top concerns were service reliability, performance, speed of repair and competence of tech staff, the survey results tells you something about how business views AOL.

Despite this, the Internet trade press ran several pieces of AOL puffery not long before the price increase was announced. Past and some ongoing problems were admitted, but the emphasis was on the mighty efforts AOL was making to improve its infrastructure and that things would be rosy Any Day Now. (Remember that AOL spends very big bucks on advertising and promotions, some of which flows into the coffers of Net and computer magazines. You don't think they run the ads and include those AOL disks for free, do you?)

Well, I've heard that before, and I admit there has been improvement. During the depths of its problems, after going to unlimited flat-rate service, most customers were lucky to get online at all. More recently, they could manage it, even if it took three or four tries. The system still was subject to overloading problems, and bombarded customers with ads and sales pitches at logon.

My biggest gripe, however, is with an AOL problem I have not seen mentioned by any other writer in any publication to date. (Read on, and if you've seen something similar in print elsewhere, please let me know.) That problem is AOL's policy of closing its doors to "outside" e-mail when its system load gets very heavy. I don't know what is the load factor that triggers raising of the e-mail drawbridge, but I do know it occurs. Some of you have seen my earlier article on this phenomenon but some haven't, so I'll explain.

What happens at such times is that AOL automatically returns all incoming e-mail, and allows only email originating from AOL customers to be delivered. (I'm not certain whether or not e-mail going from an AOL customer to someone with a non-AOL address is affected. I've had conflicting reports on that, but there have been definite indications that it does occur. One editor complained recently that he had to send an e-mail message to me three or four times before it finally went through.)

That's bad enough. The way AOL does it makes it much worse.

When AOL returns the rejected e-mail, it includes this message: "The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ---<johndoe@aol.com>" This leads the sender to believe he or she has a bad address. Many have told me they simply stopped trying to send e-mail to some AOL addresses for that reason.

I'm not talking about spammers here, understand. These were not mass mailers sending out tons of sales pitches, just folks wanting to communicate with a fellow Netizen or responding to a request for information.

How many AOL customers have lost e-mail due to this policy and the way it's implemented, I have no idea. I suspect that it's far more than anyone realizes. How much time has been lost by people who did persevere and managed to get e-mail through the AOL system after three, four or five efforts? I don't know that either...but I do know I personally have spent four to six hours at times trying to get my articles out to the 20-some editors with AOL addresses on my e-mail list - when it took only 20 minutes for the rest (now 80 plus) who have non-AOL addresses.

(The Latest: AOL shut down by electrical fault - news report 2/24/98
America Online's Internet service was shut down Monday night by an electrical problem the company said had a wider impact than a wave of electronic mail problems last year. The problem shut down the entire online service at 9.15 p.m. EST and customers were able to log onto the service again at 11.45 p.m. EST. Electronic mail was still not available as of 12.45 a.m. EST Tuesday. AOL said it did not know what had caused the electrical problem or when its electronic mail would again be available.)

Ken Fermoyle

Ken Fermoyle (kfermoyle@earthlink.net) has written some 2,500 articles for publications ranging from Playboy and Popular Science to MacWeek, Microtimes & PC Laptop. He was cohost/producer of radio talk show on computers and a partner in a DTP service bureau during the `80s. Fermoyle Publications currently offers editorial, consulting & graphics design services. Copyright 1997, Ken Fermoyle, Fermoyle Publications.


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