F*@&$#g AOL

I've just spent a total of about 6 hours trying to sort out a friends AOL broadband access. It's been working fine for the last two years, but a couple of weeks back the USB modem broke and needed replacing. As USB modems are pretty useless anyway, and prone to all kinds of problems, I decided to replac it with a Belkin wireless modem/router, firstly because I have one and it's been faultless for the last three years, and also because my sister had one which she used, trouble free, to connect to AOL.

I installed and configured the new modem and everything's worked fine for the last three weeks until last week. The modem could no longer connect to AOL. A (lengthy) phone call to the AOL support people, in India!, resulted in them basically saying that "this happens sometimes" with Belkin modems and we really should be talking to them, and by the way, Belkin modems are not supported by AOL. What the heck is that supposed to mean. When we called Belkin they quite reasonably said they're sorry about the problem, which they'd heard about before, but the problem is definitely with AOL. I must agree with them as this modem works just fine with my ISP (BT), and why shouldn't it work with AOL? - surely they should provide a service that works to an industry standard. They don't tell you that it's a non-standard service when you sign the contract.

A trawl through the web gave me a lot of hits with many other frustrated people having had very similar problems - everything working one minute and not the next. Thankfully I got lots of clues as to what I could try in order to resolve the problem and one of them did (amazingly) work, although for the life of me I can't understand why it did. Even more annoying was that none of this information was available on the AOL website.

Next week my friends will be terminating their AOL contract and moving to BT, and will even save a couple of pounds each month on their subscription. AOL seem to be an example of a company that's very happy to take your money but offer little in return. They seem to have no interest in making life easy for their customers, and I hope they go bust as soon as possible.