Despite protests from customers about increasing costs, the turnover of subscribers has fallen to its lowest level.
The number of online subscribers has fallen to 3.6 million, from around 22 million at the time of the company's disastrous mega-merger with Time Warner in 2000.
Willcom subscribers have fallen steadily since 2007, while DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank have continued to boost their subscriber base.
RIM also announced its number of global subscribers had fallen by one million over the three months - the first such drop.
Shares in China Mobile, the world's biggest phone carrier by subscribers, have fallen more than 5% after second-quarter profits disappointed investors.
But in most of the countries that M Metrics tracks — Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy — the percentage of mobile phone subscribers buying a ring tone in an average month has fallen consistently over the last 12 months, to a low of 3.4percentt in Britain in October.
Analysts wondered if this would be enough to get AOL growing: its advertising revenue in the second quarter was 40% higher than a year ago, but that was more than offset by lower revenue from subscribers, whose number has fallen by 30% since 2002.
The dial up business continues to decay – at one time AOL had 26.7 million dial up subscribers, but it has fallen to just 6.9 million today.
In the phone business, which uses a broadband scheme known as DSL (digital subscriber line), the cost of new equipment has fallen by 60% to 70%, says Armando Geday, chief executive of GlobespanVirata, a major DSL chipmaker.
But the company has started to come under close examination by investors over its subscriber growth in the U.S., which has fallen short of projections.
