AOL to slash 5000 jobs

This arti­cle first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=37

URL: AOL to slash 5,000 jobs

The death spi­ral for AOL’s dialup busi­ness hit a new low this week, as the com­pany announced it would dis­trib­ute its access soft­ware free of charge in the United States.

AOL will also offer some con­tent and ser­vices for free, includ­ing e-mail. Some of these ser­vices will include adver­tis­ing, fol­low­ing the model that Yahoo and Google have employed.

The com­pany announced mas­sive lay­offs in its oper­a­tions, pri­mar­ily in call cen­ters. These lay­offs will help com­pen­sate for the lost sub­scriber revenue.

The dialup access busi­ness has been in decline for years in the U.S., as res­i­den­tial cus­tomers choose faster “always-on” con­nec­tions like cable modems and DSL. In Hawaii, Time Warner Cable is the dom­i­nant provider.

Clear­wire has entered the Hon­olulu mar­ket with a wire­less broad­band ser­vice that uses cel­lu­lar phone sig­nals to pro­vide broad­band. This ser­vice does not require a fixed-wire instal­la­tion, and it may be attrac­tive to users who change their res­i­dence fre­quently, such as students.

Tagged as: advertising, AOL, broadband, call center, Clearwire, content, customer, free, Google, Hawaii, Honolulu, revenue, student, USA, Yahoo