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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.
All these people are being laid off, and now they'll be sitting around in Starbucks without even having any connectivity.
I loved my cable modem. I had it for 3+ years, worked flawlessly, good upload speed, GREAT upload speed, all the stuff you know.
OK, now I live in an area that isn't wired yet, and Comcast's predictions as to when it will get here seem to be rolling out into the future.
Meanwhile, Comcast here in Maryland seems to be endlessly running ads for new people to sign up. I wonder what will happen there?
Meanwhile, being 30k+ feet from my CO means that I am anxiously awaiting the installation of my ISDN line, complete with per minute charges. Blech!
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
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
Well I'm also a source, please quote me as saying 88 is, "not quite half" of their employees. There. Now it is cast as fact and not even the trolls can dispute it.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
You may disagree and claim that somebody can sell a CD full of the necessary tools for Windows users. Indeed this may be possible, but it will never rival the ease with which a Linux vendor can put together a Linux distro. And that is because each of the shareware programs has its own unique license, which may or may not permit redistribution and/or resale. Therefore the lack of connectivity will be good for Linux and bad for the competition.
-sting3r
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.
This happened to me twice in the past week. They know it's happening, and they seem to be taking their sweet time fixing it. If you don't muck around with your network card, release/renew, etc. you shouldn't run into any problems since it's only with the DHCP.
This is one time Linux dhcpcd is a bad thing- it's one of the few DHCP clients that actually plays by the rules, releasing your IP when you shutdown. Windows doesn't bother.
Overall ATT Broadband has their heads up their asses. They have managed to develop the WORST voice response system EVER. If you call the cable support number, they drag you through a huge menu, only to tell you to call another phone number. Another menu, a recorded woman who tells you about Nimda, how to reset your cable modem, then a recorded man who also tells you about Nimda, then a hold time ~20 mins. No wonder these companies are going under.. they couldn't manage a cable company, let alone an ISP.
I believe most of the functionality you mentioned has been "assimilated" into XP. :-)
Another point: linux distro CDs will cease to be readily available in the coming months. Stores are realizing that they are full of out-of-date stock of various distros that aren't selling. Don't believe me? Go to Staples/OfficeMax/GenericOfficeStore and look in their clearance section. It's sad.
So I think that the loss of broadband providers will have no positive impact on OSS.
Since a week ago or so my latencys have been huge. Pinging www.yahoo.com would get me times of 200-500 ms. Considering I playing online games a lot that just isn't acceptable! They get better early in the morning, I wonder if @home's network structure is suffering.
At least I now have time to finally finish Homeworld
I've emailed Starbucks about availability of this service and they responded that they do not advertise it until all stuff is trained, but I am welcome to go to the store and try. I went, and it actually works very nice, thought little expensive.
Taking into account all expenses of running T1 into each of 500 stores, delaying service roll out could cost a lot. I guess it cost enough to run Mobile Star into financial problems.
Well... firstly, thought it's annoying.. often the compay that's providing internet service is affiliated with, or a branch of, the company providing you with cable TV.. but not hte same company or the same office. They rely on the cable-TV technicians to do all cabling-related issues.. and just use their internet guys to hook up the cable modem itself. So if a line goes out.. they expect you to call the cable TV people.
Also.. if you check your bill, they may or may not indicate the fact that $10 of your fee is actually a 'cable line fee'. ie: in Calgary, if you have cable TV, it's $49.95 for internet. IF you DONT have cable, it's $59.96 ($10/month for the cable line). Sleazy.. but kind of makes sense.
As for lost money, that's 100% your problem, not theirs. If downtime costs you money, you need to weigh that against the cost of a backup solution. That is, unless they made some kind of guarantee of service to you.
I live near Excite@Home HQ. I await the furniture auction; they had good furniture.
Looks like everything is still better value in the Americas...
Over here in the UK it's going to cost me £40 (that's about $55) per month to get NTL Cable, with 512k down & 128k up. That's the only broadband option -- ADSL is being completely mismanaged by BT.
But then again, from the sounds of it, the people over here could actually have the right idea about pricing -- at least they're not all going out of business.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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!
Many businesses are now failing, not because of bad technology or bad business models, but because of poor execution. Startups are particularly beholden to their early investors, and all of the VCs were heavily pushing "land grab" business practices throughout the bubble. The reason is obvious: Stocks were valued primarily on audience, and if you want the best quick return on your investment, you demand practices that build audience share, period. Early investors don't care about long term prospects for a business, they just want a quick cash-out to flip into something else. The 1997 changes in post IPO-lockout (from two years to six months) only magnified the short term focus. Having structured the business with that bias, the result is inevitable.
Businesses fail for all kinds of reasons, many of which are completely out of control of the management or techs. Don't dismiss an idea just because somebody screwed the pooch in the past.
...-.-
Here, where I am. New Westminster, BC (suburb of Vancouver) I have both ADSL (1.5mbps down/540kbps up) and cable (SHAW@HOME - 3mpbs down/540kbps up) and I've had both in varying areas of the city for well over a year (4 years in the case of cable). I hate to admit it, but, I've had excellent service in the whole time (2 days downtime in 4 years isn't bad), with the occassional hiccup here and there, nothing serious.
I pay $40 CDN for each service, thats about $26.00/month in US dollars. Neither of my providers (Shaw & Telus) is in trouble of going down, both are very linux friendly. No special software to run or anything. I run 2 servers with both static and dynamic IP addresses. The only thing is other than the cable company censoring (refusing to carry) certain newsgroups, I can't bitch. Those of you in the U.K., you have my sincerest sympathies. Here it's cheap and reliable. There are also a number of independent ISP's offering ADSL at the same price and service/speed levels. There were at least 4 others last time I checked about 6 months ago. Why all the problems south of the border?
Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity!
I'm a full-time telecommuter in Houston, with my main office in Dallas, both cities in MobileStar's Starbucks coverage area. I love getting out of the house, and with Ricochet gone, this was the best cheap alternative that let me work somewhere other than the house for a couple of days a week. I used the service yesterday, and I'm packing up my laptop again this morning to meet the Starbucks staff at the door at 5:30. They know me by name - I can't imagine a more perfect target user for this product. (Well, not that I'm perfect, but that too.)
I've signed up for MobileStar twice. The first time was an incredibly bad experience, so bad I started e-mailing their corporate staff by guessing their names (first initial, full last name @mobilestar.com). It worked, and I got a couple of suits to listen to my stories, and they even made some changes to their web site to reflect reality. They said it would work with any 802.11b card (but it didn't), they had router problems (couldn't pull up my Webtrends or other reports on 8000-9000 port range), the tech support staff would forget about your issue and not call you back. (On a side note, their tech support was extremely qualified, friendly, and easy to reach.)
What made me cancel was that it wasn't bulletproof reliable. They had a couple of days during my first month where I couldn't log on, and I had to call their customer service. In both cases, they couldn't fix the problem within a few minutes, and at that point, why should I bother to continue to burn my cell phone minutes, hanging around in Starbucks? I've got work to do, and faced with the prospect of either packing up my gear and going to another Starbucks (where the connection might not work) or going home to my DSL, I would just go home. You don't pay $30-$60 a month for that kind of reliability.
The access itself was awesome: I rarely saw anybody else in Starbucks using it, and so I had a full T1 to myself. My bosses loved it because I was always reachable, and I could do any diagnostic work remotely.
But again, the whole time I was using it, I only met two other people who used it. People just won't pay $30 a month to get wireless access in a coffee house, not when their home DSL or cable modem isn't much more than that. And one, two, or three users a month don't pay for a T1, at least not at those prices.
What's your damage, Heather?
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.
They bought just short of the release cycle and bought too much... Seems Wal-Mart's been handling it pretty much correctly- 5 of the latest copies of Mandrake at any store at any time; when they run out they know via their inventory system how fast they ran out so they can plan restock in an orderly manner and make sure they don't have much in the way of stale overstock and don't run too short for too long.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
BT seems to be charging in the same general ballpark for ADSL and ISP service that Verizon's charging for things here in Dallas, TX. It's a little more expensive (I'm getting 764k down and 128k up from them for about the same US dollars value...) but it's not enough to really count it as being that much more.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
While it would have been nice, a T1 wasn't strictly needed. A fat ADSL pipe (1.5mbit down 764k up) would have handled them nicely (and much more cheaply when it could be obtained). Most people wouldn't need the bidirectional bandwidth that a T1 provides.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
At first, I was not able to comprehend how Excite@home could be losing money when so many people were marching to broadband - unless they were running an Amazon.com-lose-money-on-every-transaction-and-mak e-it-up-in-volume business model. It remained a mystery until I found out that the only thing they do is provide all that useless crap "if you miss AOL, you will like this" content, and something about help(less)desk.
I certainly never cared for the former, and the latter is so bad that I would have to spend 30 minutes on the phone proving I had a clue and the problem was on their end before they would bother to look and see if the problem was on their end (it always was when I called because I knew enough to troubleshoot my own network first)
The most annoying thing about Excite is that I originally signed up under MediaOne RoadRunner - the Terms Of Service were great! I could run any server/OS I wanted to as long as I wasn't reselling their service or causing configuration/security problems. I had a good firewall and I ran an NT4 server with IIS, MS SQL server, and Cold Fusion for development purposes for over a year - never a problem. Once they switched to Excite, the TOS says I can't run any of that, soI shut down outside access to those services.
The Digital Sorceress
Mine has cost $49.95/month from day one, and I don't think they are going out of business any time soon (I've had it for going on 4 years now). The only drawback is they force you to have a cable TV subscription as well, so if you don't already watch TV, it's more like $80/month. Still a good deal for 500K/s both directions, and being allowed to run any damned service I want on my servers.
The article says:
Not all of AT&T Broadband's customers are affected, including those who live in areas served by MediaOne before AT&T's acquisition.
I live in a Chicago suburb that was MediaOne beore AT&T Broadband. I had MediaOne Express service still up until just last month when AT&T started converting us to @Home. In fact, I'm pretty sure they are still in the middle of doing this.
We got a call at our house late last night from AT&T asking if we had already been switched. I'm not sure what that means. One possibility that comes to mind is if we hadn't yet switched, they might have wanted to let us know not to try to switch over now (the customer initiates the switchover by downloading and installing the @Home "software" which turns out to be some utilities that change your network settings and test your connection after you reboot.)
This arrangement, with @Home controlling the IP service, made some degree of sense when it was originally set up. Much of the friction between @Home and its cable-television shareholders (AT&T Broadband, Comcast, Cox, etc) that has been reported recently is due to the cables wanting to provide services to IP devices other than PCs, and @Home dragging their feet about supporting them.
Happenned to me two days ago. I had to find out just how fucking awful the tech support is. The support person couldn't even create a ticket because their own trouble ticket system was down. What a fucking joke! Their 24.11.49.1 gateway is down (my subnet). I fixed the problem myself. How to fix? Turn DHCP off, since it won't work anyway. Set the netmask to 255.0.0.0 and set your default route to some other gateway e.g. 24.11.50.1. Try it, it worked for me.
Oh that's just SPLENDID.
I currently live in the Philadelphia area. A short while ago Comcast took over the existing Adelphia cable system. I have a 1-Way surfboard cable modem (telephone upstream, cable downstream.) Adelphia promised for the last 2 years they'd upgrade the infrastructure to support 2 way.
When Adelphia turned over the area to Comcast, it still maintained the cable modem network. So I still actually pay Adelphia for my cable modem, but my cable company is comcast. Comcast sent a letter out sometime in early August saying come September 22th, existing 1-way cable customers could schedule migration to 2-way. The date came and went, and I received no call from the cable company as promised.
Two days ago, I phone Comcast@Home to see what was up. Their reps are CLUELESS. The conversation went something like this:
"Ok, so you sent me this letter saying you'd have 2-way cable ready last month. So now you're telling me it's not ready?"
"Sir, your area is currently not servicable for 2-way."
"Then you guys just sent me this letter for the fun of it? Inventing dates off the top of your head? This couldn't have anything to do with the fact @Home is in bankruptcy now could it? Are you even installing new modems?"
"Yes we are."
"So when's my area going to be ready?"
"I don't know."
Argh!
I live approx 19,000 feet from my CO which makes me ineligble for DSL. I'm stuck with this crappy SB1000 modem for which the service is INCREDIBLY flaky. Both cable companies play "pass the blame" whenever I have service problems.
Besides DirecPC Satellite Service (and oh, the nightmare stories I've read about them) are there any other alternative high-bandwith solutions I should be aware of?
I live in a brand new subdivision that basically has no hope of getting any kind of dsl/cable broadband any time soon (God bless Qwaste and the Deathstar).
Then a neighbor told me about a small isp (Mesa Networks) that was offering fixed 802.11b connections for residential service in my area with 1-mbps up/down for $58/month. I called them up, arranged an installation time for a week later and have been up and running with no problems for a few weeks now.
Since then, it occurred to me that small shops like these offering fixed wireless access are a perfect compromise between the bloated-beauracracy-from-hell providers (ie here, here and here) and the unreliable, unmanaged, unavailable you-get-what-you-pay-for communal neighborhood nets that have been spawned as a backlash. It's become obvious that turning a profit offering broadband where last mile wiring is involved is extremely difficult if not impossible. But, the infrastructure to manage fized wireless seems a lot more manageable from a small business perspective to me
Anyway, I don't have the time, inclination or expertise to professionally manage an isp network and I really hope that the model these guys are pursuing pays off - I think small local providers have a much better chance of tailoring solutions that can cost effectively meet the broadband needs of neighborhoods and communities.
Mobilstar was just a lousy deal. I had no idea they were in financial trouble, so I actually considered signing up last week. I decided not to, because they want a year contract and $29.95/month for local-only service, only in Starbucks. You can't work from Starbucks, so this isn't really a serious service - it's a luxury item. Which is all very well and good - I would have bought it anyway - but it was just too expensive for the sort of person who would want wireless - a person who travels. They wanted $0.15/minute in addition to the $29.95/month if you wanted to use their service out of the area.
When will people learn that metered internet service is a non-starter, and that you need to provide a service that is priced attractively if you want customers? If they'd charged $29.95/month for access anywhere they had connectivity, they most likely would have generated a lot more income. Sigh.