AOL is raising the price of it’s utterly useless dialup service to match the price of its utterly useless broadband service:
NEW YORK (AP) — America Online Inc., seeking to encourage its subscribers to sign up for high-speed connections, is raising the price of its main dial-up plan to equal that of its new broadband offerings.
That means most subscribers will pay $25.90 a month for either dial-up or broadband beginning March 9, although AOL is offering discounts to dial-up subscribers who commit to a year. AOL currently charges $23.90 a month for unlimited dial-up access.
“We’re doing this because a majority of AOL members will be able to get high-speed connections and access the AOL service for this new price,” spokeswoman Anne Bentley said Tuesday. “Hopefully it’s an encouragement for them to get high-speed connections.”
Although AOL has been shifting its focus to providing free articles, video and other materials on its ad-supported Web sites, the company sees paid broadband accounts as key to making that strategy work.
AOL believes broadband will help boost usage and hence advertising. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, those with broadband at home are 52 percent more likely than dial-up subscribers to use the Internet on a given day, and the typical broadband user spends about 23 percent more time online daily.
I’m sorry, but that’s just frightening. $25.90 for dialup service is so far out of line it’s ridiculous. AOL is still the number one ISP in the country, and here they are telling all their customers that they’re going to raise the rates, yet again, and give them nothing for it in return, yet again.
A year ago, there were reports that AOL had finally recognized that people could get DSL for less than AOL’s dialup and decided to lower its dialup prices. This lasted for all of about a month, before someone internally freaked out and quietly raised the prices back up. Apparently, that didn’t shake all that many customers off of dialup, so the company figured that if they’re stuck with people who like paying more for dialup they might as well jack up the prices even higher and (at the same time) make it clear just how clueless their own customers really are. So, the latest strategy is to raise dialup prices for AOL so they’re the same as broadband prices. Yes, it’s as if they’re mocking their own customers for not moving up to broadband.
After a slap in the face like that, you have to wonder why people would stay on AOL.
[tags]aol, techdirt, broadband, isp[/tags]