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AOL soon found its niche: As a safe place for beginners on the Internet, especially for children, through a walled garden (restrictive) approach to the Internet. AOL's association with user-centric Apple also underscored AOL's commitment to make its own service user-friendly.
And some of AOL's early initiatives were groundbreaking. For example, in its days as Quantum, it partnered with LucasFilm to produce the online game Habitat, one of the first attempts to build a large-scale commercial multiuser virtual environment, and its offspring Club Caribe. In 1996, AOL debuted AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which helped bring instant messaging to the masses.
However, this same approach soon made it the target of the tech-savvy, who objected to its restrictive approach to the Web, and derided the inexperience of its user base. "AOL was considered Internet training wheels," says branding consultant Rob Frankel. "It offered a closed system on the Web. It had mainframes that cached the Web and offered people appropriate pages. AOL thought it could keep people captive."
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If AOL executives did think that, it soon became clear they were mistaken. By the end of the 1990's, even non-technical users were becoming comfortable exploring the Web and discovering that other ISPs would give them unlimited access to the "information superhighway." But while some users left AOL, more joined, encouraged by AOL's simple interface and the thousands of floppies (and later CDs) with which it flooded mailboxes.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
