A PRICE WAR BREAKS OUT ONLINE

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America Online and Prodigy are staging a mini-price war. You can now connect to Prodigy for $9.95 a month for five hours and $2.95 for each additional hour, down from a flat $14.95 for unlimited usage before. America Online responded immediately by cutting its hourly charge to $2.95 from $3.50. AOL already was charging $9.95 a month for five hours of hookup time. The other major online provider, CompuServe, charges $8.95 a month for unlimited usage. However, all three services charge extra for various premium services like travel reservations services and certain bulletin boards. Analysts say the price war was initiated by Prodigy because its subscriptions have been stagnant at 1.1 million this year while AOL's have soared from 500,000 to over 1 million and CompuServe's have grown from 1.5 million to 2.3 million. Expect the war to benefit you even more in coming months, as the online services vie to hold onto their customers and do everything they can to upstage their competitors.