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Verizon offers lower-priced Internet DSL service

Seeking to further undercut its cable competitors, Verizon Communications has unveiled a lower entry-level price of $14.95 per month for slower high-speed Internet service.

The new price seeks to draw more dialup customers to DSL (digital subscriber line) service while keeping them from choosing cable for high-speed Internet access instead, especially at a time when cable companies are bundling Internet service with flat-rate digital phone service.

Verizon's new price is for download speeds up to 786 kilobits per second and requires a one-year contract. SBC Communications, of San Antonio, Texas, launched a similar offer in June, but at faster speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second.

Verizon also announced it is starting to include in its DSL service, without extra charge, an array of features from Yahoo such as virus protection, photo-sharing and music access, although customers may instead choose MSN.

Verizon charges $29.95 per month for its standard DSL service with speeds up to 3 megabits per second and has offered a discount rate of $19.95 per month for the first three months. In some areas, including parts of the Tampa Bay area, it is rolling out Fios service on fiber-optic lines with faster Internet speeds at higher prices.

Despite the discounting by phone companies, cable operators continue to dominate the overall market for high-speed Internet access, although new customers split about evenly in choosing DSL or cable.

America Online Inc., the world's largest Internet service provider, will pay $1.25-million in penalties and costs, and reform some of its customer service practices to settle an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office.

About 300 consumers had filed complaints with Spitzer's office accusing AOL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., of ignoring demands to cancel service and stop billing.

The company, with 21-million subscribers nationally, rewarded employees who were able to retain subscribers who called to cancel their Internet service. For years, AOL had minimum retention or "save" percentages that customer service personnel were expected to meet, investigators said.

That led many employees to make it difficult for consumers to cancel service or simply ignore such requests, Spitzer spokesman Brad Maione said.

As part of the settlement, AOL of Dulles, Va., agreed to eliminate any requirements that its customer service representatives maintain a minimum number of "saves" to earn a bonus, a policy in place at "various times since 2000," and record all service cancellation requests. It will verify the cancellation through a third-party monitor, investigators said.

AOL, which cooperated with Spitzer's office, did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement.

Intel Corp. has unveiled a new "Viiv" brand for desktop models aimed at broadening sales into home-entertainment systems.

The new package of chips, whose name rhymes with five, goes on sale early next year. Devices with Viiv may look more like DVD players than PCs and will switch on instantly via remote control, said Don MacDonald, who heads Intel's digital home group.

The company is adding capabilities such as television and audio to help its PCmaker customers grab consumer electronics orders and to fuel sales growth of at least 10 percent at Intel.

Viiv will allow computermakers to sell devices that immediately recognize various types of video, audio and photo files, MacDonald said.

Intel also showed off three microprocessors last week based on a next-generation technology that tries to maximize performance and power efficiency while minimizing electricity bills.

The new chips, expected to become available in the second half of 2006, are partly based on the design in the Pentium M, the processor component of the company's popular Centrino technology for notebook computers. It also will share some features with the Pentium 4 underlying architecture.

Intel and the rest of the industry have been focusing less on raw speed and more on efficiency recently. After years of ratcheting up clock speed of a single core for better performance, newer chips divide the workload between two cores but run at a lower speed.

As a result, performance has continued to improve while power requirements have been held mostly in check.

Microsoft Corp. soon will make available to the general public a tool for warning users about "phishing" scams that could lead to identity theft.

Currently, such a tool comes only with the Internet Explorer 7 browser, which is available in tests only to a select group of developers.

But within a few weeks, Microsoft will incorporate it into a toolbar for older versions of IE. While still officially a test, the antiphishing tool will be available to anyone running the Windows XP operating system with the Service Pack 2 security upgrade from last summer.

The company eventually will make it available to older Windows systems, too.

The tool was built to address scammers who try to trick people into revealing passwords by posing as legitimate banking or e-commerce site.

A lot of people apparently have a lot of cell phones sitting around the house. Because of the strong response to the Personal Tech story last week about cell phone recycling, we're starting a list of nonprofit groups in our five-county area that accept old phones. Groups interested in being listed should include this information:

Name of agency

Contact name and title

Address: Street, City, ZIP

Phone

E-mail (if applicable)

Web address (if applicable)

Accepts: Working and/or nonworking phones

What it does with donations: 1-line description of where donations go.

The information can be e-mailed to personaltech@sptimes.com Meanwhile, to repeat, cell phone carriers such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint usually have drop boxes or will accept old phones for recycling at their stores and mall kiosks. Check with the carriers or their Web sites for more information.

Check out more news, views and links about technology throughout the week with Times personal technology editor Dave Gussow at the Tech Times blog (www.sptimes.com/blogs/tech) We invite you to join the conversation by posting comments and questions.

[Last modified August 26, 2005, 08:44:03]