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Sprint ION's $100/mo, 8Mbps Home Service Tanks
Dr. Zowie writes: "In the current gloomy high speed connection market, a ray of light was Sprint's ION service. For $100/month, they would provide local phone service, long distance service, and 8mbps down, 1mbps up DSL-like digital connection. I've been waiting for the service to turn on to write a review about it -- but the service has been discontinued and all orders are being cancelled. Too bad -- ION was like a geek dream come true." ION was only available to a relative handful of people, but it sure sounded good. Anyone have suggestions for this sort of combination service?
I don't see it.
Having everything on one line is a technical utopia...
but I'd rather see everything over one network.
You see.. even if everything comes in over one line for $100/mo.. how is that different from $30/mo for a phone line, and $50/mo for DSL?
Also.. what do you mean 'long distance'. Long distance service is not relveant... you get that with any phone line.
Home phone service worth ~$20 a month.
Long distance worth ~$20 a month. (Currently free with many cell-phone plans)
Broadband access worth ~$40 a month.
Total = $80 a month.
I just don't see 100 bucks a month being a particularly good deal. It would be convenient to have everything under one package, but not worth paying a premium.
"Push" sure didn't get consumer broadband to the tipping point; neither did e-commerce, voice over IP or Joe Cartoon's not-ready-for-TV rich media.
But here's the thing: Short of Intel declaring that all machines using its chips need a broadband connection, about the broadest way to encourage Bubba PC User into broadband is to tweak the OS in such a way that it forces involuntary connections -- connections for things like product activation, Passport use, etc.
There's a mountain of DSL research that says Bubba was buying DSL (when he bought it at all) primarily for the always-on feature, not for the speed. Folks don't like the dial-up process. Well, Microsoft is heading down a path that will force a lot more dialing up, so it's a safe bet there might be a lot more interest in always-on connections.
Yeah, I know: A chicken-and-egg scenario -- is Microsoft betting that pervasive Internet connectivity means less consumer fussing over the forced connections or are they assuming that people will find easier ways to make connections if they're forced to do it more often? Not sure the answer matters, really... but it's safe to assume XP (or, more likely, the sure-to-be-more-invasive successor to XP) will send more consumers down the broadband path.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Because as we know, products live and die in the marketplace based solely on how great the idea is, and profitability is one singular factor rather than an amalgamation. You never have to worry about things like capital for advertising and manufacturing, relationships with other vendors, and unexpected resource limitations, let alone less "open" issues like exclusive deals between distributors and competitors, legal but unsavory tactics like "Scorched Earth" policies (Wal-Mart's phrasing, not mine), and so on.
The market's a wonderful thing, but when we say it rewards what's profitable, we often take that to mean that it rewards delivering the best possible product at the best possible price. But those two things are not identical. Many people recognized that DR-DOS was a better product than MS-DOS; at the start of the PC era, CP/M-86 was arguably a better product than PC-DOS. It lost first due to missteps by Digital Research and later on due to Microsoft's unethical OEM contracts. Note that I'm not commenting on the legality, but in my opinion requiring your customers to pay for your product whenever they use a competitor's is pretty seedy--and it's undeniably taking active steps to avoid competition on the open market.
I can't comment about Sprint's ION service specifically, but having worked in telecom for a while, I know that even for the largest companies there are a lot of factors that can get in the way of rolling out services in a timely fashion that you can't control. You're dependent not only on your vendors but usually on your competitors for critical parts of any large order, which can make for a marketplace which--while workable in its own way--is certainly nothing Adam Smith could ever have envisioned.