The age of fast growth is now over. Arlen says that about 60 percent of American households have Internet access, and most researchers believe that the number will hover at that point for some time. Unlike TV, which has a penetration of more than 95 percent, Internet access doesn't seem to be a must-have for everyone. A certain percentage of the population can't afford it, and another chunk has tried it but not liked it.

"Everybody who wants to be online is online," Arlen says, and that's not good for AOL. "AOL used to be a point of entry to many people online, and there are now relatively few newbies." Still, during the last year, AOL's growth rate hasn't been terrible. The company has added a million new users in the last nine months. Microsoft's MSN service, which has benefited from prime placement in Windows and what Arlen calls "very heavy marketing," is adding a million users every six months -- but at 8.7 million subscribers, it is far smaller than AOL. EarthLink, which has around 4 million members, is growing as slowly as AOL is, but according to the company, it has managed to alter "the mix" of its subscriber base, switching many of its dial-up users to high-speed service. (Microsoft, which is releasing version 8.0 of its MSN software on Oct. 24, declined to comment on its online service.)

Wonderful as the advent of the high-speed Internet might be for users, broadband is not generally considered to be a great thing for Internet service providers that make most of their money from dial-up customers. The main reason is economic: Profits in the dial-up business are good, while the profits in broadband are paltry. To provide a user with a broadband connection, an ISP like AOL or EarthLink must essentially rent space from a phone company or a cable company at rates of between $30 to $35 per user per month, says Dave Burstein, editor of the newsletter DSL Prime. An ISP that offers access at $45 a month, as AOL does, is making as little as $10 per month on a broadband customer, as opposed to more than $20 on a dial-up user. (Burstein says that the wholesale rates charged by telephone and cable companies are "totally out of line with cost" and that some regulation to remedy the situation might be in order.)

The unfavorable economics of broadband are expected to deal a severe blow to AOL; Merrill Lynch has estimated that the migration of users from dial-up to broadband may reduce AOL's cash flow from a projected $850 million in 2003 to as little as $235 million in 2005. (This is the worst-case scenario.) But, analysts say, if AOL doesn't offer its users a compelling reason to switch to AOL's own broadband plan, they may go somewhere else.

AOL is thus often described as being in a kind of ISP no-man's land, stuck with millions of dial-up users who might leave at a whim for broadband service elsewhere, or who might go with AOL's broadband and automatically become lower-margin customers. The ideal for AOL would be for every one of its customers to keep dialing up, indefinitely -- but to its credit, the company realizes that's not a plausible scenario. However slowly, broadband is coming, Burstein says; ISPs would be wise to heed that trend.

AOL's broadband "strategy" is anything but clear; it has offered no far-sighted strategic vision for broadband, and it has not said how it plans to deal with the lower subscription revenue from high-speed connections. The one thing AOL has been clear about is that there's no such thing as a "mature" subscriber, that people interested in broadband are not any less interested in an easy service.

"I get this question a lot," Kimball, the marketing vice president, says of the theory that people can become too sophisticated for AOL. "This is how I respond: I start off with my daughter who is 7. Will she come to me when she's 12 and say, 'I've grown up steeped in technology, so what I really need you to do is go build me a way to read my mail that is really complicated'? We think that simplicity or ease of use doesn't map to experience."

Kaufeld, the author of "AOL for Dummies," says something similar. "My wife is someone who's written for several computer books and she's not a tech slouch, but she doesn't care," he says. "She does everything through AOL because she says it's just easier, and because her friends are on AOL." Kaufeld adds that every so often, he gets an e-mail from someone saying they're leaving AOL. "But then I get another e-mail saying, 'I'm back. I couldn't stay away.'"

When you think about it, the idea that people would eventually feel hemmed in by AOL's proprietary interface and content has always been somewhat fanciful, the wishful thinking of access-only ISPs and the AOL-haters on alt.aol-sucks. AOL is certainly ideal for novice users, but after you've used it for some time, made friends there, and learned the ins and outs of cyberculture, are you suddenly going to leave the system because you're too smart? Maybe, but that doesn't seem likely. And according to the numbers, there's no real evidence suggesting that AOL's subscriber base is shrinking.

But if AOL's prospective broadband users have no immediate reason to leave AOL, is there an immediate reason for them to stay? That seems to be the one question AOL is struggling hardest to answer.

Perhaps with the recognition that the company's greatest asset is the exclusive, proprietary content it provides, the company is taking its cue from TV and offering scheduled content in AOL 8.0 -- programming offered at specific times on specific days. "Not only do I need to be online because that's where my friends are and because I've got to check my e-mail," says AOL's Kimball, "but also because it's Tuesday night, when there'll be new artists online, and Thursday is movie review night. We're creating a model where I've got to be online Saturday morning, I've got to be there on Sunday night. I really think we're creating this pattern through the week where you feel like there's value in all of the time online."

Many of these programs, the company says, will be enhanced for high-speed users, with video and audio tailored just for AOL members. The company also says that some of its "community" features will benefit from high-speed connections -- two DSL-equipped AOL members chatting with each other might simultaneously watch the same video, for example.

Is this the kind of thing that broadband users want? It may be, the experts say, but there's no guarantee. Burstein, of DSL Prime, says that nowhere in the world has broadband adoption been spurred by exclusive content. "It sounds good but I ain't seen any proof it's going to work," he says. "The idea is, there's so much on the Internet already, why would you need that content?" Especially, he adds, if AOL charges more for its service than other ISPs, since the one thing that high-speed customers do seem to respond to is price.

But is it really the case that the Internet is brimming with free multimedia content? Perhaps in the days of Napster that was the case, and maybe people who know where to look can still easily find what they want.

But what about everyone else? What about the people who have not yet seen the light of broadband, who don't know how to find a video codec, who can't figure out how to install a peer-to-peer file-sharing system while avoiding the scourge of parasite software? In other words, what about AOL's natural customers? Even if they'll now be going at full speed, maybe they'll still want their Internet to come with training wheels.

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