AOL Broadband www.aol.com Review

Overall Rating

Ideal for insomniacs who sleep all day and evening and are awake all night after midnight and can do everything then.

Terrible speeds, a company that thinks it can dictate what you do online, evasive and/or incompetent technical support staff.

I have been with AOL Broadband almost three years. To my surprise, in the early days (before the Carphone Warehouse takeover), it was very good. They gave me a Netgear modem and a free upgrade from 1Mb to 2Mb.

However, in the last year the service has deteriorated greatly. I live between two addresses, so often AOL is paid £14.99 for months when there is no usage on the line at all. Since Christmas I have been using the broadband more again and have had constant problems with the download speed in the evenings. It drops to 20 k/bytes a second when a 2Mb connection should give up to 200 k/bytes.

Using any kind of peer-to-peer software seems to trigger this permanently, regardless of how much data you download. I have been monitoring my download totals. Many days it is under 500Mb with a very occasional peak of about 2,500Mb. It is well within the supposed 40Gb per month allowance.

The tech support seems to be in India, which would be fine if it was effective. But it isn't. I had the usual runaround again and again. It was the modem, it was the cables... But curiously those things only impeded the speed between 4pm and midnight every day! After midnight the speed was back up to what it should be.

Then I was told that peer-to-peer software 'isn't allowed' on AOL. Well the BBC iPlayer downloads are peer-to-peer and p2p software in itself isn't illegal. I had been using it to download legally.

Finally they gave me a new log-in, a free month and upgraded me to 8Mb. All was fine for a week or two with speeds of up to 600 k/bytes until I used peer-to-peer software again and I am now on as little as 16 k/bytes a second in the evenings and unable to watch any online video until after midnight.

Obviously some kind of very severe traffic shaping is going on to the extent where the connection becomes effectively useless every evening. In anutshell, AOL wants you to pay for the service but not use it for anything.
I've asked for my MAC code.

Members' Comments onGuest's Review

• Irsteve on 8th Jul 2009

  I found this review helpful because I am having exactly the same problems...