America Online Inc. is blaming recent service problems in France on the "passion" of its online customers -- in particular a minority of subscribers who are hogging the service, making the most of their 99F (roughly $14) per month for "unlimited" access. The complaints by both the online giant and its customers are reminiscent of problems AOL faced in the United States in 1997 and 1998, when the service was plagued by outages due to mushrooming demand. In response to the recent woes, AOL France is planning to quadruple its network capacity, add 60,000 more connection lines, and double the size of its customer-support staff. Full story (in French). -- Christophe Guillemin, ZDNet France
