First and foremost, let me tell you why I decided to write about a subject as touchy as this.
It all started back about 2 1/2 months ago when I came out of my room on a Monday morning. I needed to check my email, and I was using America Online as my Online Service Provider. I went to sign on and I got a "Invalid Account" error message. I thought this was odd, the reason being that I was signed on not more than 6 hours ago and everything was running somewhat smoothly. I tried to sign on again and got the same message. So I tried my friends AOL account using the guest sign on. It worked fine and I was online, so that ruled out a bad connection or something. I tried one more time and it gave me the same error message. I was livid, here I was trying to access some important email and AOL had gone and blocked my account! My mother who just so happened to be standing in the next room heard my frustration and asked what was wrong. I told her of the problem and she told me that my father had just been using AOL earlier and it was working fine. That made me even angrier. So I asked my mom if she could call the AOL service hotline and ask them for assistance. When she called the hotline the man on the other end said that she could not access information about the account because it was under "my fathers" name. This angered her and me alike! Here she was paying for AOL and could not even access her own account! So she called my father who had just made it to work. He said he would try and call and see what was going on. He called us back about 10 minuets later and said a block had been placed on the account because we did not pay the bill. We had signed up using a checking account and our bank had blocked AOL access to our account. Well that is fine but why? According to AOL when my father signed up he did not use the universal transferring code that our bank uses. We called our bank to find out about this mystery code, that AOL had not informed us about, and they told us that AOL needed to update their records. So my dad called AOL back and told them what the bank had said. The guy at AOL said that they were updated and that all my dad needed to do to reactivate the account was submit a credit card number and it would be turned back on. My dad told the guy "if I had a credit card do you think I would of used a checking account to sign up?" Well they couldn't answer that one. So my dad said the heck with it we're signing up for Earth Link! He then proceeded to cancel AOL and that solved allot of problems.

See on AOL there are people called "hackers" that can crack your AOL password while you are online. AOL has almost no security measures to block this. Also AOL members are bombarded by "spammers", who constantly send unsolicited email to you while you are online. What does AOL have to say about this. Not much in my opinion.

AOL also claims to be the fastest OSP. This is true in some cases, but the fact is that you are not truly on the Internet, as AOL like's you to think. You are actually on AOL's network that is a little different than the real Internet. Yes it is true that you are accessing the Internet through AOL, but not at the 56 Kbs rate that AOL claims that you can achieve. They really in my opinion are deceiving their customers a bit to give them the illusion of high speed Internet access. True you do sign on to there network at 56,000 Kbs, but government regulations prohibit data transfer over the Internet at no higher than 36,600 Kbs. What does that mean? No matter how fast AOL claims you are signed on at, you will never get a 56,000 Kbs connection over a regular phone line and a standard V.90 56,000 modem.