Andrew K. Mandel '00, a Crimson editor, says he has seen the negative effects of the on-line service's popularity.

Mandel works in a tutoring program for three hours a week which takes place over AOL. The programs allows children to come to "chat rooms" and ask questions of the tutors on duty. One tutor goes into the room to help guide the student in solving the problem.

Because Harvard has a special server through which students can log on to AOL, Mandel says he personally has not experienced busy signals getting on-line.

However, many of his fellow tutors have.

"Those students who can get on are on for a very long time," Mandel says. "It's much more hectic to weed out who actually has a problem and who's there just to cause problems."

Mandel says the program is attempting to alleviate the problem by limiting the number of students who can log on to AOL at the same time.

"The service I work for [is] working on solving the problem by making it a revolving door, letting certain people [come on] at a time," he says.

However, Mandel says he does not think this solution is going to be too helpful.

"When the demand is high, it's not going to help permanently," he says. "I guess we're going to have to wait and see."

Steen says he has also experienced problems with AOL when he has tried to use it.

"I tried AOL a few times over the past months and it is really slow to connect to," he says. "When I tried it I had to wait 20 minutes or more just for a connection to do anything at all."

Steen says the slow rate of the service frustrated him so much that he gave up trying to connect again.

"Getting to e-mail required even more time," he says. "I did not have the patience to even try to get to the Web."

AOL is currently ordering new modems and installing them, a process that will take several months to complete, Nerzig says.

"We're spending $360 million to install different modems," Nerzig says. "We've also curtailed our marketing activities. It only seems like the right thing to do."