AOL is the exception. To exploit this pipe, ISPs must be able to control their customers' graphical user interfaces to the point where they can be used to present retail offers and ads. AOL can do just that. This isn't to say that the only road to DSL reality is paved with a zillion unwanted ads. What AOL is teaching us is that when a network service is offered at a fixed price per month, something must be added to it to generate additional revenue to offset increased usage.
Traffic costs money to transport, no matter what the free-bandwidth advocates say.
DSL providers will be searching for DSL revenue sources, to be sure. Bell Atlantic, for example, has also launched a menu of DSL service offerings targeted at small businesses. DSL will likely be the focus of some of the application hosting offerings, given the fact that small businesses are somewhat more likely to be consumers of application hosting than their giant-corporation partners. AOL's partners are speculating that total DSL penetration could exceed 30 million households within two years, and AOL says its partners could potentially cover about 55 million households. Prob-ably not in the near term.