Years ago after the installation of my first high-speed Internet-access line, I wrote a column that ended with the line, "Will the last person to leave America Online please shut off the router?"

My comment then was a jab at the dial-up users and how they were silly to keep paying $24 a month for slow dial-up when broadband obviously was going to take over the world.

After I wrote that, I noticed AOL actually grew by 2 million subscribers, hitting a peak of 27 million in 2002.

Turns out I was correct, of course, but about five years too early. Today the company stands at 18.6 million paid subscribers. Its parent company has dropped the "AOL" from the Time-Warner name and it has been rumored more than once AOL is on the sales block.

In an effort to ease that rather ominous trend, AOL is poised to make some pretty surprising moves. One of them, according to The Associated Press, will be to give away AOL.com e-mail accounts. The goal would be, of course, to improve advertising revenue for the falling giant. If you want an AOL.com address you may happen upon some advertising and buy something. It's all about driving traffic these days. With places like Google, Yahoo and MySpace taking the bulk of Internet traffic, it's all about driving eyeballs these days.

I have been an AOL customer for years, since it was called Quantum Link. It served a great purpose for travelers (lots of access points) and parents (it has the best parental-blocking technology out there).

But I think the AOL board has it right. Instead of just watching the numbers drop, it is going to take some strides to match the success of its Instant Messenger program, which is the Esperanto of teens.

The catch is, will anyone want an AOL e-mail account anymore, with the amazing offerings now from Google, Yahoo and many more? By comparison, AOL's e-mail is slow and clunky. Of course, it could improve the offering, but it had better hurry.

There are so many cool things now on the Web and so few of them have come from the massive camp of AOL.

Instead they are coming from the likes of Google and Yahoo, which are nearly completely advertising-based.

"Just about everything AOL offers, you can get free from Google, Microsoft or somewhere else," Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime, told the AP. "How long are people going to pay for that?"

Well, not much longer, is my guess. It's not time to turn off the router, but we're getting close.

What AOL should do is halve the price of dial-up service now that high-speed options are everywhere. When I used to need my AOL dial-up for traveling, I found it invaluable. Now every hotel in which I have stayed in the last two years has had high-speed wireless access (sometimes free).

But whatever happens, the die is cast for AOL, which will go the way of CompuServe, Delphi and so many more before it. (I remember not so fondly paying $24.95 per HOUR for access to CompuServe during the day. And that was on my 1,200-baud modem.)

One thing about AOL: I will sort of miss the CDs when they quit coming.



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