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.

Comments

the irony is...

[po_boy]

All these people are being laid off, and now they'll be sitting around in Starbucks without even having any connectivity.

P2P No not peer to peer

[bstrahm]

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

Re:P2P No not peer to peer

[TekPolitik]

I'm sorry, but this is bollocks. A good CEO, and a well structured marketing plan backed by a focussed department (no matter how big or small) is VITAL to the success of these companies.

I'm pretty sure the original poster was referring to the value of marketing to the economy, not its value to the company. Marketing has negative value to the economy because those who participate in it produce nothing of value - they merely try to persuade others to choose their employer's thing of value over somebody else's thing of value.

Theories that try to suggest that marketing has positive value to the economy appear to operate based on an assumption that nobody will by any of the things they need without marketing being there to tell them what they need. In other words, they assume people are too stupid to figure out what they need and then go buy it. Such theories are fundamentally unsupportable.

If marketing were not to exist at all, things of value would still be produced, at a lower price (due to the drop in overhead from marketing). What's more, those currently putting their efforts into marketing would be forced to gain employment producing things, so more would be produced, generating more tangible wealth for everybody.

Marketing is one of the known defects of a competitive market - the attempt to alter the supply and demand aspects of a product not by alteration of the price or quality, but by creating a perception of difference, and when one competitor does it, the others are forced to.

A Source?

[eAndroid]

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.

Re:A Source?

[Kris_J]

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".

But there are positive effects

[sting3r]

Although the loss of two more high speed providers in the US is inherently a Bad Thing(tm) for consumer choice and cheap Internet access, it could be a boon to Open Source adoption. How? Because most Linux distributions come with all of the software that the average user needs, all unencumbered by fascist licenses and all on a few CD-ROM discs. Having just set up a Windows 2000 box for a friend, I found myself needing to download and install dozens of separate commercial and shareware packages (such as Mozilla, WinZip, WinAmp, hardware drivers, PuTTY, and service packs). The reduced availability of shareware sites like Tucows to the average consumer makes him more likely to opt for a solution that does not require so much downloading. In addition, Windows applications are rarely foreward-compatible with OS updates, and need to be changed every few months. Thus the path of least resistance is Linux.

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

Hard times for Linux-friendly ISP's

[chrisserwin]

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?

Re:Hard times for Linux-friendly ISP's

[Russ Steffen]

That is correct. I keep an Earthlink account for traveling. No problems connecting with Linux - it's just plain old PPP. Their Windows software is just a dialer that knows all the local access numbers, and there are plenty of other ways to get those. I just keep the current list in my Palm.

Re:Hard times for Linux-friendly ISP's

[Fencepost]

Worldnet is an option, though they don't make it easy to sign up without their software. Dig around on www.wurd.com to find a link to a completely web-based signup page.

Restrictions:

• must explicitly enable Internet access to email via the web-based configuration if you're retrieving from outside their dialups;
• must use SSL tunneling to the mail server for the same;
• outbound SMTP is blocked, but the block can be removed by request after the account's been active for 30 days;
• Can't get the el-cheapo accounts, which require an ad banner while you're connected anyway.

Lack of advertisement!

[krokodil]

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.

Excite@Home - who needs it?

[Animats]

It was never clear what value Excite@Home added. The cable company provides the infrastructure for cable modems, and some backbone provider provides the long-haul portion of the service. Excite@Home was supposed to compete with AOL's "content", or at least that was the hype a year or two ago. Apparently they also did tech support for cable services, badly. So, no great loss.

I live near Excite@Home HQ. I await the furniture auction; they had good furniture.

Re:Excite@Home - who needs it?

[rise]

Not particularly close. Excite@Home may have sucked (especially the Excite portion) but they actually did handle most of the infrastructure and had their own backbone. Of course with AT&T slurping down any parts of the company that look tasty to it that's changing rapidly, but @Home used to do the router-herding etc. to make the system work. The really stupid part of all this is that the @Home portion was still doing okay financially - Excite managed to lose so much money it dragged the rest down with it. Not a broadband failure at all, just another BS "Portal" biting the big Kishko.

My sources? A former @Home Tier-4 Network engineer and a few people who worked in the NOC. No bones to pick there...

Re:ATT@Home DHCP problems

[DavidJA]

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.

F.Y.I. There is no requirement in the RFC for a client to release the IP address.

MacOS 9 and before will release the lease upon shutdown and there is nothing more annoying then 50 angry mac users screaming at you at 8:30AM because the DHCP server went ass-up the night before and none of them have IP addresses.

FROM: http://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2131.txt

"...where the client retains its network address locally, the client will not normally relinquish its lease during a graceful shutdown. Only in the case where the client explicitly needs to relinquish its lease, e.g., the client is about to be moved to a different subnet, will the client send a DHCPRELEASE message."

Re:This Happened Yesterday...

[jonathan_ingram]

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.

@Home has long been dying

[batobin]

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!

Re:@Home has long been dying

[maggard]

What did you expect @Home to do? I'm a AT&T Broadband in the former MediaOne territory (which means we explicitly ARE allowed to run our own web-servers etc - it IS in our local AUP and we've all received letters from the powers-that-be confirming this when @Home was first introduced) and even we were blocked.

What else could have been done?

@Home managed a patchwork network with 1.35 million customers. There's no way they could have quickly rolled out a response to Code Red on the scale required. As it was parts of their network were beginning to saturate before the block was put in place and with much of the activity now dampened they've removed the block.

1. How to identify the Code Red afflicted machines?
2. What kind of infrastructure would even be required to monitor & identify Code Red-type problems across the @Home network?
3. Would the @Home customers (the corporations, not the individual subscribers) even be willing to pay for this addt'l service?
4. How fast could this be budgeted and deployed?
5. What policy applies that differs Code Red from acceptable network traffic?
6. How to contact the thousands of afflicted customers?
7. How to tell them all that they'll need to wipe their drives and rebuild from known good backups (like they have any) if their PC's are to be considered secure again?
8. How to provide that scale of customer support?
9. How not to take the blame from those customers for having "given them Code Red"?
10. In the meantime how to slow or stop the spread of Code Red, dampen the traffic problems?
11. Can't filter at the routers; that sort of specific address management is hell on routers and couldn't be applied at the scale needed.
12. Cutting off individual customers by deprovisioning them would overwhelm the support infrastructure as well as piss off thousands who would suddenly find themselves without service and no way to even patch their PC's.
13. What kind of precedent would this set?
14. Would @Home go from being a simple ISP providing basic connectivity to a cop ensuring what travels over it's network?
15. What if others took advantage of this? Could RIAA file an injunction and force @Home to apply any comprehensive monitoring & blocking system it put in place (for Code Red et al) to block Napster et al?
16. What about the next virus/worm/trojan horse? Would the policies/procedures/hardware/software/monitoring so expensively & complexly put in place for Code Red apply for the next nasty to appear on the scene?

No, while @Home did a terrible job at informing it's customers and training it's own staff they did finally get the response right - heck, they really didn't have any alternatives. Just blocking the ports and getting their network traffic back under control was clearly what needed to be done and the first step for any possible response strategy.

As to support most @Home customers won't trust them to get the date right; the Dilbert cartoon about letting cable-modem support monkeys reel through their script while waiting for the point a human intellect kicks in was so @Home!

By the way the @Home pages on Code Red still just say "patch your server." No mention it's been sitting on the 'net for who knows how long beaconing out it's lack of security to everyone and is now likely thoroughly pilfered and riddled with trojan horses, new accounts, turned into a zombie. Wonder what the legal liability is for bad advice like that?

Bad Execution, not bad tech or biz models

[n9fzx]

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.

The secret

[Jason Straight]

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.

Re:The secret

[blair1q]

You're comparing two utterly different business models.

A cable drop costs about a thousand bucks to install (with equipment), and you get $30 per month, every month, for years. Have you ever heard of anyone voluntarily dropping their broadband connection to go back to DSL or analog speeds? I sure haven't.

A corvette costs about $25,000 to produce and you only get to sell it once.

But, if your drops are crappy and your customers are stupid, you spend that $30 and more on repairs and handholding. And you've got the cable companies (known mother-rapers) as middlemen hocking you for a bigger piece and screwing up customer service even more out of spite. This was @home's problem. Excite's problem was that they believed their own hype and market cap and did some supremely stupid things insted of doing due diligence and trying to make a business.

$1300/mo for a T1 line is insanely overpriced (the phone companies are antediluvian retards). $30/mo for a cable line is insanely underpriced. $50/mo or so is the residential ballpark, $200/mo for businesses.

--Blair

What does Excite actually do?

[DigitalSorceress]

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.

Re:excite@home doesn't really provide the service

[michael_cain]

At least as of today, this simply isn't true. AT&T Broadband (where I work) owns the head end equipment, and in some cases the cable modems. The backbone was owned and operated by @Home until recently, when they sold it to another part of AT&T (not Broadband), who leases capacity back to @Home. Key servers (DHCP, DNS, mail) and routers are still all owned and operated by @Home.

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.

Re:Feeling @home's woes

[Tassach]

Hmm. I just tried pinging yahoo from my @home connection and got 14 ms avg ping time. Ping times to my gateway are under 8 ms.

Try doing a traceroute to identify the bottleneck before blaming @home. It could be any server between you and yahoo that's causing the slowdown.

Re:They didn't "need" a T1...

[eggboard]

You're completely right, but the deal MobileStar struck with Starbucks to get access to their stores was to install T1 lines in *every* facility they went into at their (MobileStar's) expense. This always seemed too generous to me. Starbucks wanted a corporate network; MobileStar wanted to use Starbucks to leverage a national deployment. The money just wasn't there, nor would the revenue ever meet the probably $200 million ticket for deployment. (They burned through about $100 million, I believe.)