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Mobilestar Less Mobile; Excite@Home Less Exciting
jc1 writes: "MobileStar, provider of 802.11b wireless LAN connectivity throughout 500 of the USA's Starbucks cafes, has laid off 88 of its staff, which a source described as "everybody". With the demise in August of Metricom's Ricochet service, one is left to wonder if there is a business to be made in providing public wireless Internet services." Or any broadband internet access at all - Excite@Home, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, has stopped taking any new orders.
Path to Profitability.
2 years ago, it was get a customer base, then figure out how to exploit them to make a profit. Now people have realized that there are no barriers to entry, so you can't raise prices later. You have to show up front how you can make money off of each and every customer from day one, then hope you get enough of them to overcome useless overhead in the corporation (read, the CEO, CTO, C??, and much of the marketing dept.)
The days of giving away dollar bills for 3 quarters to generate revenue are over for the internet, show me how you can make money, or go the way of the Dodo bird
It seems that this is just another case of the "small" ISP not making it. The profitable ones get bought up, and the rest... well...
I've had great difficulty finding an independent ISP in Eugene, OR. The two best, pond.net and continet.com, have both been sold to EarthLink in the last 8 months. Qwest.net has gone MSN, except for Macintosh.
The following are all options, none of which are particularly linux-friendly: MSN, AOL, JUNO/NetZero, Earthlink. You can still get ppp by telling Qwest that you have a Macintosh... that's it; everybody else seems to have proprietary software. I think this is a big challenge for getting joe-user to try a linux desktop.
Are the days of the simple, no-strings-attached ppp account gone?
...but it'll be coming from the mobile phone companies, like SprintPCS's "wireless web" and Voicestream (eventually AT&T too) with their GPRS. Doesn't look like unlimited service anymore, now pay by the minute or MB, at least for a while.
There are independant coffee houses in Seattle that offer free wireless access because they realize that customers might stop by and buy coffee and food whlie they use it, but they don't want to pay $30 a month for it, or a per-minute charge, since they are already spending money there. They go spend $50 a month on an ISP, $200 on their wireless router, and it's pretty much good.
I think where Starbucks failed was not adding wireless access, but thinking they would be able to charge a fortune for it instead of assuming they can make back the cost, and more, by the people that would stop by and have coffee while they use it that wouldn't stop by otherwise.
I've know @home was dying ever since the Code Red viruses first struck. Up until that point, I was permitted the ability to run my own email and web servers. When the viruses were ravaging @home's bandwidth, they created a blanket port filter on 25 and 80 (email and web). Needless to say, this pissed me off.
When I called to complain, I was sent to an endless queue of representatives who couldn't care less about my problem. That was the last week I subscribed to @home.
I guess they had more important things on their minds, like not going bankrupt!
Yeah, but which 88? If it's all engineers, support people and other tech-minded people then it's "everyone". If it's management and sales then it's "nobody".
My company offeres wireless locally at speeds up to T1, we have bandwidth control in place via QoS under linux to ensure customers don't use all our bandwidth for hosting and dial-up. We have IP accounting data from iptables and allow our customers to xfer up to 10GB for their initial $49/mo. They get all the speed they need but if they use the bandwidth then they'll have to pay for it. Every company that undersells bandwidth is going under, we are going strong.