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Microsoft Soft-Pedals Dialup
twitter writes "The NYT reports Bill Gates surrender of dial-up Internet access. 'We stayed in the access business for a while, and then we decided it wasn't for us.' $314 million in advertising yielded $300 million in losses last year." Microsoft's dialup service isn't disappearing, but the company is scaling it back and ending the expensive marketing campaign. This leaves exactly how many big players in the dialup market? Dialup is still the only option in many places.
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Yeah, right.
You guys make it sound like msn dialup is going away. The poster himself did this right after he said that it wasn't going away.. MS just isn't going to spend 300 mil on advertising anymore. The whole 'how many large dialup players does the leave' thing makes it sound like dialup is on its way out and everyone who can't get broadband is going to be left out in the cold without access to the internet. There are a ton of dialup solutions, even if MSN dialup went away which they aren't... people would still have plenty of choices.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that does satellite TV (and occassional satellite internet installations). This is why I'm posting anonymously.
The new DW6000 doesn't require installing software on your computer, it's all in the DW6000 unit. So you're no longer tied to Windows-only. As long as you're sighted-in to your assigned bird, then you're good to go. Yeah, rain-fade is a problem and there are occassional outages.
Biggest problem: Tech support is absolutely abysmal. My last call to support was 2 hours, 6 minutes, 37 seconds and the problem still wasn't resolved (it's a long story, but the problem was at the NOC but the NOC people didn't see it that way).
Caveat emptor, but still better than most rural dialup. Huge latency, so it's useless for games, webserving, etc. If you can afford it, try multilink bonding with 2 modems. If not, then you may want to consider DirecWay.
We have a big call centre here. MSN is one of their big clients. I guess most of those people will soon be out of work.
From what I've heard, the big problem with MSN isn't the advertizing, it's that they install really buggy software ("MSN 8"). A lot of people ended up getting fired from the callcentre for telling MSN customers how to use the plain-old PPP settings & Internet Explorer/Outlook Express to use MSN. It solved their problems, but wasn't in the allowed script.
They use someone's national network, but they just added new modems in Wisconsin, so what ever system they use, is growing, not contracting.
Even with broadband, there still is a use for dialup, especially for travel. If I had a laptop, the ability to dial up in Stevens Point, WI might come in handy if I decide to visit their famous Point beer brewery.
Earthlink is no longer related to the church if scientology. Sky Dayton's slimy ass left years ago. It is now just a regular run of the mill megacorporation who only cares about its stock holders.
The class-action lawsuit holding Best Buy and MSN accused of fraud for scanning MSN discs for people paying by debit or credit card and saying it's just for inventory reasons, and then six months later MSN would bill them, saying that the free period had ended, whether or not they used the access . . .
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That MSN really is one of the most expensive dialup services in the country, and does not have the most extensive dialup number ranges. Add to this poor lines in major cities (never could get Chicago or Philly lines to stay connected longer than eight minutes), and that there are far better alternatives (Netzero/Juno, etc.) . .
That in many areas, $25 is the same price as most cable systems are offering for an introductory offer. Get faster connections without having to tie up or get another phone line? Why would you stick with dialup?
Just another failed business model for MS that was too late to be viable.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
V.92/V.90 56k technology did not exist at the time of 386/486 chips. Old stuff tends to blend together, but I think 56k technology X2/56KFlex/V.90 came out around the time of Pentium/Pentium II's.
> In 1992, I had a US Robotics Courier V.Everything modem that cost $500. I had to
> purchase a 16650 UART chip for my serial port to get high speed transfers. It seemed
> like a lot of software was still distributed on 3.5" disks. Fast forward 12 years
> later to 2004. After all that time, modems run at exactly the same speed. V.92(?)
> was fast when the 386 and 486 were kings but not any more.
Man, you should check your memory with a doctor.. In 1992 NMP5 was a new invention
to speed up the transfers of those cool 2400 bps modems by a factor of up to 2. A
little bit later the 2496 chipsets were released (2400 data, 9600 fax), and
US-Robotics made the world go crazy with their hot 9600 HST (9600 forward 450 back)
which later improved to 14400 HST (still 450 back channel). By that time, v32 and
v32bis were standardized and gave 9600 / 14400 (full duplex!) to all.
Somewhere in 1994 there were 3 players, Telebit PEP Trailblazer with their
amazing 18432bps technology, US-Robotis with their HST 14400 (which worked very
well on noisy "satelite" connections, see Phrack/2600), and ZyXEL - the new
player who improved over v32bis with their proprietary 16800 and later even 19200
bps modes.
V34 (28800 and later 33600) was standardized around 1995 if I recall correctly.
X2/56K came a year later or so, but stayed proprietary solutions for a year
(USR vs Rockwell), until v90 was defined. Only recently v92 was introduced as
minor improvement - minor enough to not be employed in many places (eg in
Europe most dialup access points are v90, not v92).
So, while in fact the US Robotics hardware remained the same over many years
(the "dual standard" platform that came with HST 14400 (not 9600) and v32bis
had enough horsepower to add the newer modes with firmware flash upgrades),
the dialup modem technology has definately evolved in those 12 years. The
only thing is that there is simply no way to stuff more data into a channel
of such limited bandwidth. v34 is about the limit for "telephone line 3khz",
and v92 is about the limit for "channel digitally sampled at 8khz 8bit".
There's no more to do, everything is done already. You could make it cheaper
or smaller or lighter if you really wanted to, but you can't make it faster.
Marc
i'll start out by saying that if there is a small, local ISP near you, it might be a good way to go, provided you don't travel or plan to move in this lifetime.
with that said ...
i've been a satisfied EarthLink customer for many years now. I switched to their broadband offering since it first came out, and have gladly seen their services dramatically improve. EarthLink makes a lot a sense in my case, as i do travel around quite a bit and find it easy to find and connect to a local POP while using a portion of the 20 hours of free dial-up time that come with my broadband account. They have consistently been at the forefront of spam-fighting efforts, be them legal, or thru software. Their spam-fighting solutions are top-notch, especially since their recently-released Total Access for Mac OS X which allows you to sync your Mac OS X Address Book data with their server, allowing you to almost instantly "whitelist" everyone you know, as Mail.app makes it easy/automatic to add contacts to your address book based on mails received and/or sent. I do also appreciate their other initiatives to fight other Internet annoyances: Pop-Up blocker, server-side scrubbing of e-mail-bound viruses (Virus Blocker), SpyWare blocker which have been resulting in my having to spend less time trying to help my PC-using friends debug their machines. They've also recently released for both Mac OS X and windows, their "EarthLink Accelerator" which is totally bad-ass and results in a dramatic accelration of web-surfing, especially when i use my 15" Apple Aluminum Powerbook's bluetooth connectivity with my Sony Ericsson t610 to dial-up to my EarthLink account at speeds that are limited to less than 14.4Kbps. EarthLink Accelerator is technology licensed from Propel Networks, these guys are really really cool.
so again, Mom and Pop shops are a good alternative, but do keep EarthLink in mind if you're an impatient Internet user. (which i am, to a great extent heh).
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> This leaves exactly how many big players in the dialup market?
Ummm... Well, there's AOL, but nobody uses them 'cause they suck. There's
Earthlink, but nobody uses them much either. There'ss MSN... I think I know
one person who uses MSN. There's Juno, but almost nobody uses Juno either,
because it's inferior. A few cheapskates use that NetZero, but to most of us
it's worth the extra ten bucks a month to get decent service. There's demon,
but you have to live in the UK.
In any given community un the US, on the other hand, there are anywhere between
3 and 30 local or regional outfits who all charge the same monthly rate for
unmetered access, provide enough lines that you never have trouble getting on,
provide good, solid, reliable email, access to usenet if you want it, and
(gasp) have an office within thirty minutes' drive of your house, and a tech
support guy who lives in the area and speaks English. We call these places
"ISPs", and almost everyone I know uses one of them.
I get my access through Bright Choice, which is located in Ontario, about
20 minutes from here. They provide the dialup lines but outsource most of
the other stuff to bright.net, which is local to Ohio. There are a number
of competitors. Probably the single most popular ISP around here is richnet,
which is based in Mansfield, about 30 minutes from here. Almost nobody uses
AOL, though *theoretically* they're based in Columbus, an hour from here.
MSN is (very marginally) more popular than AOL because they have a reseller
here in town (at the local Radio Shack), but I've not heard good things about
their service from their users. Richnet and bright.net OTOH get good word
of mouth recommendations consistently. I bet richnet has a 30% market share
in Galion, maybe more. With so many mostly-identical options, that's quite
a lot of share for one outfit to have.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.