America Online announced today that if you have a broadband connection of your own, you can now use their service for free. That’s right…FREE.

A lot of people, myself included, held on to AOL over the years due to wanting to keep our email addresses. They finally cut us a break a few years ago with a BYOB (Bring Your Own Broadband) plan that they charged us less for, but it still was a silly amount. So the new plan is to be ad-revenue based and those of us with our own broadband connections will now be on the $0.00 plan. The only odd twist is you have to call them to tell them you want to switch. It took me a little while to find the correct number, so anyone else looking for it, it is 1-800-984-6207. When I called there was about a 20 minute wait. The only disclaimers to this is I am no longer allowed live tech support and you get no dial-up hours per month. Fine by me, I’ll live!

It’s interesting to see such a radical change for the once mighty AOL, but the times are changing and they had to do this or not even exist in a few years.