THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, January 25, 1997 TAG: 9701250279
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 50 lines
America Online Inc.'s problems remind Digby Solomon of a quote about a restaurant that's often attributed to baseball legend Yogi Berra: ``Nobody ever goes there anymore. It's too crowded.''
``I say every business should hope they have this kind of popularity problem,'' says Solomon, general manager for the Chicago-based Tribune Co.'s Digital City Hampton Roads service on AOL.
But Solomon concedes that AOL's difficulties handling demand for its service are serious. ``You don't want to anger your good customers,'' he says.
Digital City Hampton Roads, an affiliate of Tribune Co.'s Daily Press newspaper in Newport News, is suffering along with other AOL content providers from the logjam at the nation's largest online service.
AOL has more than 40,000 subscribers in Hampton Roads, according to Solomon, and Digital City has been selling ads on its online service to local businesses with the expectation that those subscribers would have access.
Solomon says he expects AOL to solve its capacity problem, but in the meantime local users have alternatives.
One is to switch from AOL's standard access plan of unlimited access for $19.95 a month and go instead to the company's bring-your-own-access plan, which costs $9.95 for unlimited usage. With this plan, you need to have your own separate Internet-access provider and use it to travel via the Internet to AOL's site.
Using this service, also known as AOL's content only, avoids the first bottleneck that Solomon says can occur with AOL: its sometimes-overloaded local access phone numbers. But it doesn't guarantee you a bypass around the second potential bottleneck, at AOL's central network, he says. There, AOL can handle only about 275,000 simultaneous users among its 8 million subscribers, Solomon says.
Another alternative is to use a couple of local Sprint modem numbers that Solomon says AOL has arranged for locally: 626-3349 in South Hampton Roads, 596-9232 on the Peninsula. Again, using these numbers may help eliminate local bottlenecks, he says, but won't guarantee access at the central network.
Solomon says he's taking steps to provide an alternative route to his service - via the Internet. He says a Digital City Hampton Roads site on the World Wide Web will completed by the end of February.
Steve Haynes, president of Virginia Beach-based ExisNet, an Internet-access provider, says that's a wise move. ``We've probably signed up 600 or 700 AOL subscribers in the last 30 days,'' Haynes says. ``People are fed up with it. . ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC
[For a copy of the graphic, see microfilm for this date.]