With its 35 million subscribers stubbornly clinging to their dialup connections, AOL next month will roll out a revamped version of its Internet service designed to take advantage of high-speed access, according to a report in Monday's Wall Street Journal.

The struggling Internet half of AOL Time Warner will offer a broadband service that integrates video and CD-quality audio, instead of users needing to use separate media players, the Journal reported.

AOL's push to tightly integrate broadband content would build on its user-friendly approach to the Internet that allowed the company's membership base to grow exponentially in the late 1990s. That growth eventually fueled the company's January 2000 merger with old media titan Time Warner. At the time, AOL was seen as the more attractive half of the company, with unlimited growth prospects.

However, in the last year, the sheen has completely worn off AOL. Accounting questions, management shakeups, and a stagnant customer base uninterested in pricey broadband offerings have all beset the Internet unit.

AOL last week confirmed analysts' doubts that it would meet its yearly revenues forecast, lowering financial targets for the year on account of poor advertising sales, which accounts for a third of its revenues.

While AOL remains far and away the largest Internet service provider (ISP), just 500,000 of its 35 million subscribers access the Internet through broadband, despite the explosive growth in broadband connectivity in the past couple of years.

According to research by Nielsen Net Ratings, about 25.2 million U.S. consumers had broadband access at home in April, a 58 percent increase from a year ago. Yet AOL, which holds 40 percent of the dialup market, has just a tiny slice of this market.

A fast Internet connection to the home is key to making real the promised synergies of AOL huge online community and Time Warner's stable of music and movie offerings.

In the meantime, the prolonged Internet advertising slump has made converting users to higher-priced broadband offerings even more important for AOL. New AOL chief Jonathan Miller has identified the unit's broadband offerings as a key area for improvement, as he seeks to overhaul AOL and re-ignite growth.

As a move toward that, AOL last month inked a deal with AT&T to provide AOL high-speed Net access to 10 million Comcast customers. This marked a departure for AOL Time Warner, which previously had only offered AOL broadband to Time Warner Cable subscribers. The deal calls for the creation of a new subsidiary for AOL Time Warner called Time Warner Cable, counting about 10.8 million subscribers.