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Aol Still Struggling To Assure Reliable Links New Study Shows Customers Frequently Unable To Reach Service

Newsday

Three months after America Online agreed to reimburse customers and improve access to the service, an independent study released last week shows the company still struggling to provide its customers reliable connections.

During daily peak hours in March, America Online customers had a less than 40 percent chance of reaching the service with each call, according to the study conducted by Inverse Network Technology Inc. The Santa Clara, Calif., company tests the reliability of Internet service providers by making a total of 125,000 test calls every month to major Internet providers.

America Online, which is based in Dulles, Va., came to the agreement in January with attorneys general from 19 states after its new flat-rate monthly pricing plan led to an overload of the company’s system and an avalanche of complaints.

The Inverse study measures the efficiency of large national providers in several ways, including the rate at which a service fails to provide connections to its customers.

America Online, the world’s largest access provider with 8 million customers, was at the bottom of the class with a failure rate of 60.4 percent. The best was CompuServe, with a failure rate of 6.5 percent.

A spokeswoman for AOL discounted Inverse’s findings. “We measure ourselves internally on a daily basis and I can tell you that the (connection) rates that we’re showing are significantly higher,” said the spokeswoman, Wendy Goldberg.

Jennifer Bestor, vice president of marketing for Inverse, said the company’s data should not necessarily be used as a guide for the local consumer seeking the most reliable provider because service offered by a national provider can vary significantly by region.

“AOL is a very good example,” she said. “In some places AOL provides very good service, but there are others where it frankly is very, very bad.”

But Kate Delhagen, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, a consulting company in Cambridge, Mass., specializing in analyzing the technology industry, said the data is useful for a consumer in search of a reliable access provider.

“The bottom line is that it’s possible to prove (performance) for the first time ever with objective data for the industry and more importantly in my opinion for the consumer who until now has been helpless,” Delhagen said.