AOL Time Warner's online division of AOL reported that it lost over 170,000 Internet users in the U.S. during its fourth quarter. While Time Warner has nearly 35 million subscribers worldwide and dominates the market for dial-up connections at roughly one of every three dial-up households in the U.S., AOL Time Warner reported an enormous financial loss of $99 billion for 2002.

Its founder, Ted Turner, has also announced that he is leaving the company. Financial analysts indicate that the drop in subscribers is not a cause for concern yet; but that these factors combined with the fact that AOL remains stuck in the dial-up slow speed access lane could be the beginning of big troubles for the company. In the broadband market, AOL has only one in thirty customer accounts, according to some recent research reports.

AOL reported that the loss of subscribers in Q4 is just a minor blip on its financial radar screen and that this not an ongoing trend. It is interesting to note, however, that when AOL released Version 8.0, its latest software version, its subscriber numbers did not increase. Previously, when AOL released Version 7.0, its last upgrade, AOL gained two million subscribers within a short time afterward.