In a message dated 7/7/2006 5:25:54 AM Eastern Standard Time, FloridaFox@aol.com writes: Last nights news said that AOL will offer free services for those customers using broadband. They will depend on ads for their profit. The dial-up users will pay about $26 per month. They expect 25 million dial-up users to switch. So now we know why they don't care what users want. I should add that I have not searched the web to verify this. (Joan responds:) I think that may have been a slight misunderstanding. AOL has an agreement that we've talked about previously on this list where they are offering a combined DSL service plus AOL for the same price (combined) as the price of dialup alone. That may be what the news story was saying. It is actually a lot cheaper for AOL to offer their service if they don't have to provide the access so it makes sense for theme to move in this direction. Joan +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ In Oklahoma City, there is much concern about this, because it has 900 employees at an AOL call center that may be eliminated when AOL drops its subscription service, and AOL becomes similar to Yahoo and Google that relies only on advertising for income. The local paper says, "In its report, the Wall Street Journal said AOL would offer its entire menu of services, including e-mail, free of charge to anyone with a high-speed Internet conection." The paper goes on to say, "In response to an inquiry about the Wall Street Journal story, AOL spokeswoman Tricia Wallace said the company is 'not commenting or confirming anything in that article'". Here's one of many articles out on the topic: _http://www.teleclick.ca/2006/07/aol-working-on-free-broadband-internet-plan/_ (http://www.teleclick.ca/2006/07/aol-working-on-free-broadband-internet-plan/) For more articles, go to Google, enter "aol", select "news", and enter. Woody