IQ News: IQdataTop Tier ISPs Way Behind AOL

In the race among Internet service providers, Dulles, Va.-based America Online has galloped far ahead of its competition in recent years. Despite the planned merger of pioneering ISPs Earthlink Network and Mindspring Enterprises, their newly combined reach of nearly 3 million subscribers is considerably less than AOL’s mammoth 18 million-plus membership. Competition, however, for the country’s new second banana ISP–to be known simply as Earthlink and operate out of Mindspring’s Atlanta headquarters–may not come from AOL at all, but from Internet services brought to you by those scalawags at AT&T or that little start-up known as Microsoft.