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Mobilestar Less Mobile; Excite@Home Less Exciting

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the companies-in-freefall dept.

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.

2 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. P2P No not peer to peer by bstrahm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  2. The secret by Jason+Straight · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The secret is to stop trying to sell something for nothing - with the average cost of a good T1 in the US being about $1300 including local loop charges these arrogant companies cannot afford to sell T1 speeds for $30/mo. It would be the same way if I opened a car sales lot and sold corvettes for $5,000/ea. I'm only going to last as long as my credit. Bandwidth isn't cheap, why is everyone trying so hard to convince people that running an ISP doesn't cost $$?

    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.