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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.

9 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. the irony is... by po_boy · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. 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

  3. A Source? by eAndroid · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  4. Re:Hard times for Linux-friendly ISP's by Russ+Steffen · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Lack of advertisement! by krokodil · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Excite@Home - who needs it? by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

  7. Re:ATT@Home DHCP problems by DavidJA · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."

  8. 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.

  9. Re:excite@home doesn't really provide the service by michael_cain · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.