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The Extinction Of The Mom & Pop ISP Service?
RFL asks: "SFGate (site of the San Francisco
Chronicle) has this feature article describing the unexpected deaths of local Internet Service Providers after they are taken over by large telecommunication companies, leaving the customers totally forgotten. Only after giving it a moment of thought did I realize that a lot of those small ISP's, the ones with those cool cool domain names, were in fact gone. These were the mom and pop services of the Internet, and they provided excellent customer support. I even remember being able to talk to my ISP's administrators on IRC. So is it now fair to say that we have lost yet another battle against those evil corporations?" As it is with most companies that get swallowed up by larger entities, the increase in customer base usually means a decrease in customer support and personal-touch that made earlier ISPs so successful. Is there still room for the small-time ISP in today's market or has dial-up Internet become solely the realm of big-time providers?
I think you have to differentiate between what happens when small ISP customers are absorbed into a large ISP and the service that a large ISP gives its typical customer.
I owned and ran a small ISP for about six years. When we started out, big companies didn't do a very good job of getting people online. Getting the tcp/ip stack to work was often difficult, and strange modem problems were common. So there was a real niche for a company like ours, which could try to put more effort into getting people online.
And when people had problems, they could call or email us, and I'd pick up the phone. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I was the person who built the entire system, and I think I was probably able to give better support than the average support guy at a large ISP.
But times changed. If you buy a computer now -- almost any computer -- the odds are overwhelming that it's going to work. It's really easy to set up net service on a modern windows machine. After we sold our company, I went to the Earthlink site and signed up. I was online immediately, with no hassles. And they have access numbers all over the country. I've even used it in Paris. That's a big advantage. I think Earthlink does a good job.
When small ISPs were cannibalized by the large ones, it was very bloody. Customers were jerked around, email addresses were often forcibly changed, and the deals were always very bad for the guys who had the small ISPs. We were lucky -- we sold to another small ISP, and they've just added to our features, nothing was taken away. Not even the shell accounts.
Typically the large ISP wrote the contract -- they agreed to pay so much per customer, but only for the customers who stuck through the transitition. So when 1/3 of the customers dropped off, it was no skin off the big ISP's nose. They didn't have to pay for those people. And there are lots of horror stories about the big guys not paying the money that they owed legitimately, even under the lopsided contracts that they wrote.
We were approached over and over again by large ISPs who wanted to buy us. They would invariably change the terms at the end of the negotiation, and back out of comittments they had made to us. For the most part the guys who built those large ISPs through aquisition were bottom feeders, sharks who were trying to pick the bones of distressed small businesses. Most of them didn't seem like honest guys. So it was never surprising to me that guys like that didn't treat the customers well.
The real problem with the big players is that they're few in number and are vulnerable to pressure. A world with 100,000 mom and pop ISPs isn't as easy to wiretap as a world with 3 blue chip corporate ISPs. And every now and then Time/Warner/AOL or AT&T will say someting really scary -- like how they think that e-commerce people should pay them a commission, how they would be completely within their rights to block access to whatever sites they felt like blocking.
Big ISPs can provide good service, especially in a simpler world where things tend to interoperate more easily. But I don't feel confident that the market or the government will always protect consumers the way that they deserve.
In the old days they forced the guys who owned the movie theatres to sell the studios they owned. The wisdom of such a move isn't apparent to most people now. The "synergy" of having the pipe and the content is seen as a good thing.
I'm certain that we're going to see attempts to build copy protection into the net itself. I think they'll fail, but the companies will try. Those are the kinds of problems, I think, are going to be the real costs of the consolidation of the mom and pop ISPs into a small number of large companies.
You just don't get that kind of service from the big providers.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
As with everything it all depends on the circumstances. Smaller companies are (in general) far better at customer relations because they have more resources to spend per customer in this department, and the people running them depend on this for their livlihood so they're motivated to help. But a larger company can pass on economies of scale to it's customers in the form of reduced prices, special deals and so on.
It's all a matter of what kind of service you want - cheap or good. And let's face it, most people prefer to have a cheap service that they can then bitch about to one where they pay a lot more but get help. As a culture we're used to waiting half an hour on the phone for some support person who has no more idea about your problem than you do, so we've in a sense become inured to such treatment.
So I think that smaller ISPs aren't really a hugely viable concern. If they could work, I'd say it would be by catering to areas where a lot of help is needed that a large company won't provide - to nursing homes for instance. Otherwise people will try and save a few dollars everytime.
The goal of any business is providing an mutually acceptable quality of product or service at a mutually acceptable price in competition in the free market. I would be interested in hearing how exactly this is supposed to be evil. "Because I don't like it" isn't a valid argument: if there's no seller, there can be no buyer, and if there aren't enough buyers, then there can be no seller. That's why large corporations are dominant in the market, because they sell what buyers want.