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Earthlink Buys OmniSky
sydney writes: "Earthlink has decided to go out and buy the remains of OmniSky's wireless network. According to this story, Earthlink has included these plans under its 'Earthlink Everywhere' initiative. Funny thing is, they even admit the wireless, constant streaming idea isn't going to take off anytime soon. The price of stocks even fell 40 cents. At least though, old OmniSky customers will have an ISP again, for now anyway."
As a long-time Omnisky customer, this is a very good thing for me. In Omnisky's final weeks, my service went from good to nonexistent. Apparently, routers and other equipment went down and nobody was left to reboot them. Getting through to customer service was next to impossible.
Start-ups are cute, but Internet access should be left to the experienced companies who have half a clue what they are doing (both on the service end and on the profitability end). Earthlink has an excellent track record, and as a sort of a charnel house for the corpses of dead ISPs (like Juno and such), it has a proven track record in providing services and making a profit at the same time.
I hope that Earthlink's abundance of clue will last for a long time and assure us Omnisky users quick, uninterrupted service for many years to come.
df
The great thing about a soft economy is that the big fishes get bigger and the small fishes get eaten. If you have the money to spend, you can take advantage of some exellent deals right now. Earthlink has the right idea.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
I've been tantilized by the omnisky service ever since I bought my Visor Platinum, but I haven't been able to justify the cost in order to get online with my PDA. If they really want the wireless/PDA industry to take off, they'd be a pioneer in finding a way to offer the service for cheap... as in perhaps $15 per month or something like that. I realize that operating this type of service has a high cost, but I'm sure there are ways a company could bring the service to the market in an attractive manner. Right now, the lack of service area and price aren't attractive.
While I'd like to have wireless access on my PDA, I don't need it. I'm not the only PDA user with this mindset.
If they could make the service affordable, I'd definetely sign up without hesitation. When masses of people are able to sign up for the service, then the industry will boom and the OmniSky service could be the backbone of the industry.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Earthlink is NOT buying OmniSky out of altrusim, its buying OmniSky to "lock in" as many revenue streams as possible.
That's why MS wants Stinger (and MSN) to suceed SO badly, that they just pulled Maritz off the Project and put Steve in charge of it. Kinda strange the MS CEO taking direct responsibility for a project, isnt it?
Same reason for the shakeups at AOLTIMEWARNER, and for the recent OpenSource-ish(?) attempts in the Symbian/WAP/wireless crowd...
EVERY company that has a "customer base" wants to convert that base to "subscription" or to "even more subscription" (that's why so many wireless providers are eyeing the Docomo services model with such unabashed avarice in their eyes)
this will spell big trouble for both openess and transparency on the Internet, you'll have a AOL-based content control model that will only get more and more restrictive as time goes by...
this will also crowd marginal players out of the market altogether, as they are forced to spend capital trying to match the Big Guys "service for service, feature for feature"...
it will also lead to more revenue tying between the big companies, as they insist on a cut of each others pass through traffic (seen it all before with the telcos, both globally and nationally), leading to a consolidation of content creators, distributors and technology providers...(in english, 2-5 Global Giant Megalopolies (regulated by a global bureaucracy) who provide the technology and the content to much/most of the developed world). From the OmniSky Website ( http://www.omnisky.com )
Dear Valued OmniSky Customer, Today we announced that OmniSky has agreed to sell its subscriber base and key technology assets to Atlanta-based EarthLink, a leading Internet service provider.
We are very excited about the prospects of this agreement and what it means for you...
(off topic?) Guess we now know that i'm not kharma whoring, since some narrow minded Moderator/writer has mod'd me down twice for having an opinion that disagrees with theirs...let's go for 3 why don't we?..and let's give a big "Thank You" to this same person(s) for tolerance and reason and trying to further the breadth and depth of rational discussion on /. THANKS! for YOUR contribution to the /. Community.
when ***YOU*** are paying $200.00/month for content controlled and regulated connectivity and can't choose your access methods without becoming a "subscription slave" to one of the 2-5 Global Big Media/Content/Access companies, who will "legally" control or own the content on YOUR computer, please remember this post.
Ditto -- the next time you bitch about the quality of discussion on a topic and the quantity of the asci art and 11-year old trolls. Thanks again for your tolerance, reason and understanding.
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
well, for about a year when i had a wireless modem on my palm pilot(att cdpd service), i used an ssh client to login to a shell on one of my boxes and check email and do other things from there. it worked fairly well.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
As someone who used Omnisky for the first year or so of its existence, I have to say that by itself it's uneconomic for both the user and the provider. As Omnisky discovered, you can't find a reasonable price point: charge enough to cover your costs, and hardly anyone will be willing to pay it, because the services are too paltry. Charge what the service is actually worth, and you'll go broke.
Cellular providers are in a better position to offer wireless internet for PDAs than either a stand-alone company or an ISP like Earthlink. Cell providers have to provide most of that infrastructure already. And when 3G service finally rolls out, they'll have to provide pretty much everything. Wireless internet for PDAs will take off at that point: it'll be easier to find, a whole lot faster, and because of bundled savings, a whole lot cheaper.
What I will say is that when Omnisky for the Prism works, it is pretty darn cool. Unfortunatly after having it for almost a year now I have finally reached the point of being ready to dump it. I don't know what everyone elses experience is, but my Visor crashes A LOT when the Minstrel S modem is attached. I'm not talking once a week, I'm talking about 50% of the time I try to use it I get a fatal error/reboot. The modem is just supposed to work after plugging it in to the unit, but it never does - I have to do a paperclip reset after plugging it in or it doesn't ever work.
Omnisky got my suspicions up a while ago that things weren't going well. About last June I signed up to beta a new version of their software which was according to them a week or two away. Then the date got moved back a few weeks, then a few months, then just never happened.
Their technical support doesn't have much of a clue either. When you get a new modem (I've done this about 5 times now), you get prompted for an "activation code" which is just an encryted IP address, and this is burned into the flash of the modem. If you are then directed to change the IP address by tech support, the menu you use apparently writes the address to Visor storage and not the flash. This means that when/if you end up doing a cold wipe the visor out reboot, the Minstrel tries to connect with the wrong address from flash, gets the local cell tower confused, and you end up calling Omnisky tech support (Has happened to me several times). Since the modem also greatly increases the chances youre in for just such a reboot, this is not good. Omnisky tech support seems to be clueless and opinions differ on whether there is any way to enter a new IP address so that it gets burned to flash and avoids this problem.
Experiences with other Palm devices that use other modems might be better and may not present the tech support challenges that the Minstrel S has, but if others have the same experiences that I've had, the Minstrel S, Omnisky service, and the Visor Prism aren't ready for prime time.
Another problem I tried to get fixed by both Handspring and Omnisky is an incompatibility between the Minstrel S and the Handspring brand backup module. This is totally repeatable. If you start with a completely working Omnisky and Visor system, take the modem out, put the backup module in, back up the system, do a cold Visor restart (blow away everything), restore from the backup module, insert the minstrel S modem, then try to use it, it will not work - ever. If you then hotsynch, do another cold restart, hotsync again, then try to use the minstrel S again it works now, but that kinda eliminates the point of the backup module. Both Palm and Omnisky have blown me off about this one, and the only reason I bought the backup module in the first place was because the Minstrel S modem made my Visor so unstable.
From what I've heard, if you want wireless color handheld internet, buy an IPaq instead.
I bought my Handspring Visor Platinum about a month ago and like it a lot. Since I already have a Samsung SCH-3500 phone, and I pay Sprint $35 for connectivity, I have no desire to repeat charges (by buying a VisorPhone, or paying for a wireless modem and service for the Handspring).
So I searched and found Gomadic, which makes cables for connecting Palm and other devices to cell phones.
Since I already have a dial-in ISP account and a lot of minutes from Sprint, the cable is a one-time cost to get wireless on the Handspring.
The cable came in yesterday and I have not yet had a chance to get it up and working yet.
This sort of solution makes a lot of sense for people not wanting to repeat charges (for an ISP, etc.)
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman