Where to begin. OK, I had the misfortune of using AOL over the Christmas break. My parents still use that godawful service and I was stuck.
OK, I don't mind if it is slow, really, yeah it is annoying, but as long as it is steady and slow, it is ok. So why did I spend 12 hours downloading updates on her computer!?!
FREQUENT and CONSTANT DISCONNECTS. AOL would just drop me, sometimes I would be on for an hour, sometimes 2 mins. No reason. OK, so disconnects are part of the whole dial up world, they happen and it was Christmas, I knew the servers were busy and overloaded with people...
Problem number two arose, it usually took atleast 4 connection attempts to connect during busier parts of the day. I would dial in, handshake then hang at setting up the connection. Minute or two later, the modem tried again. This is rediculous, why is the modems failing authentication and network setup?
Also, when I say things were slow, I mean slow... Really slow, 800bps slow, which is rediculous. Half the time AOL would just give up trying to download pictures due to timeouts, or only download half of pages.
I worked for years in Internet Support, I actually have line tested kits at my parents house, I did some readings and found excellent quality lines, there were no spikes or excessive noise that would cause these problems. I worked at IBM Global Service for years and still know some back door accounts, sure enough I was in on a solid v.90 connection with no disconnects and a solid 3.2k/s transfer speed.
So what is happening with AOL? Just a guess, they are running horrible modems, ones that are not truly compatible with my parents modem, and probably built off of old rockwell standard FLEX technology that was flashed to v.90. Where as most providers use 3com (USR) v.everything modems which make much more reliable connections.
So there are the technical problems, on a user interface side, their program is a memory and resource hog, 8.0 takes up to much memory and is to intensive on weaker or low ram systems. Also, they have horrid browsing support, I guess they still believe their members stay inside the AOL bulletin board service mostly, which is a joke. Disconnecting is based on server calls, instead of a simple close modem command in DUN. They use their own TCP/IP stack that is not compatible with all software (including many updating products, like LiveUpdate which can have problems with AOL, though not always). They have generally poor email support, no advanced features like ad blocking, spam filtering, etc which would be epected of such a service. Parental controls are nice for families, but need to be setup, they are hardly effective on their own and in no way should be used as a way for unsupervised protection on the net.... I could go on and on, but why bother, they are a piss poor provider that could really care less about the consumer and are all about turning a buck ($23 or whatever they charage is a joke!)
If you have had good luck with them, good for you, you are in the minority and that is the reason they are so hated.
-Nick
