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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.
If the majority of the country can only get on through mom-and-pop or local dialups, that will make it much harder for Big Content to place chokeholds on how everyone accesses and uses content. If 90% of the country used AOL, MSN, and AT&T, we'd all be screwed- you'd see complete blocks on all music downloads the moment that happened.
IAAL,BIANLY
I only ask because it offers some of the same performance and reliability features of dialup: Dropouts, poor speed, and an inability to use all necessary ports. . .
You are not the customer.
Just auto-generate your registration
Yeah, right.
One of my friends used MSN for 1 year after his 6 month trial period was over because the software that Microsoft put on his computer had exploits. He had free quality dial-up service without even paying a dime. If this one person is able to figure out this exploit, imagine how many other people are doing this. MSN loses money because it can't protect against illicit use.
This leaves exactly how many big players in the dialup market? Dialup is still the only option in many places.
They're not necessary. Just get a box and a good connection, a little bit of equipment, and some local phone numbers and you're set. The costs to set one up and manage one are rather cheap. It's a smart first business to run in a rural area.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Is the real reason AOL makes money is because the masses don't know better? That you can check your email, IM people, AND browse the web outside the safety of AOL's little memory hog?
Sorry about my rant... I just have a lot of angst about these people.
- A
Who cares about "big players" anyway? Over the years, I tried compuserv, aol, and earthlink, and I always had better luck with local ISPs. They were cheaper, had faster access, and it was easier to get a -real- tech support person on the phone. They also didn't insist on installing their version of a browser and a "remote help agent" which wanted to sit in the systray all the time. The local guys had a configuration cd which simply changed network settings, and that was it. They included a bunch of other useful apps on the cd as well, but nothing I ever installed (since I had it already).
I would always rather do business with somebody local.
http://wavetex.com/
:)
The dial-up is nation-wide. The wireless is expanding but its just in East Texas at the moment.
Disclaimer: Yes I do work for these people, so buy something and help pay my salary
In all seriousness I see this as a good thing. Smaller companies selling dial-up to local areas is usually cheaper and have much better service. Sometimes they even know what they are doing and usually their customers become a bit more savy than they would on AOL or MSN.
The Anti-Blog
Dialup is a local service, and local providers have always provided the best and cheapest connections.
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.
You can survive without advertising. IMHO, most people who aren't very knowledgable in this area (I.E. someone who would have to choose between AOL or "something else") are more prone to be persuaded by word of mouth anyway. Also, I wouldn't bet against the fact that there are probably some parts of the world where MS has a "monopoly" (for lack of a better term =/ )on the local dialup market anyway.
I know more than you drink.
what about the fat slob in the butterfly suit?
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Hey, I use MSN, and it's been working just FZZZTGLLLBEEEEEEEP####$&(%*$(*%&$(*%& (Carrier Lost)
... and not a single one in New York, one of the largest cities in the US.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
"It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware the Leopard.'" -- Douglas Adams, H2G2p
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
I don't know how much the dial-up competition keeps away broadband. Dial-up will, at least in the forseeable future, remain significantly less expensive than broadband, because it doesn't require hardware. At the same time the cost of a second phone line and Internet will generally probably be about the same as a brodband connection. I'd think the main factor keeping broadband out of areas is just the immediate lack of the required technology in that area probably coupled with either a risk of profitablity, or just the inability to currently deploy the needed hardware. I've had to work in several areas with large commercial sectors where broadband would be immediately seized upon (and made profitable for the provider), but it's not, or wasn't available yet. I'd think one of the other big reasons would be that, in general, broadband is provided by companies which don't focus on it. It's provided by cable companies or telcos whose main business focal point is the primary service they provide.
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
Here is yet another example of Microsoft NOT being an invincible force in any market they damn well please. Kinda like UltimateTV, MSN Messenger (heck, MSN itself), Xbox, etc. Unless they're giving it away for free with a Windows purchase, don't assume Microsoft offering will just magically take over a market.
im sure you had a point in there somewhere, but it aludes us normal folk.
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.
> This leaves exactly how many big players in
> the dialup market?
None at all, I hope. "Big players" differ from small ones only in advertising (more) and quality (less). And none of them have ever offered service in my area despite their lies about nationwide service.
> Dialup is still the only option in many places.
I wouldn't be able to afford anything else anyway.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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 . . .
.
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
Get unlimited for far less or start your own ISP!
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.
So you're saying that in 1992 you had a 56k modem? You also must've had a time machine and traveled to the future to buy it. But you still wouldn't be able to use it since no ISPs would've supported the damned thing. Hell, v.34 wasn't around until 1993 or so. And I'm not even sure when 16650A UARTs were first adopted.
porp
I was a manager at Earthlink, in the Web Services Department. We had some kick-ass programmers there. Unfortunately, although our cool boss, Ranbir Chawla, from India, was a very good designer and coder too, he in turn reported to a backstabbing Hollywood special effects monster named Veronica Murdock.
Veronica liked to appoint pretty girls to management status, bypassing the very talented software engineers. Veronica's idiots kept forcing stupid designs down our throats.
Then she'd boast about how her EarthLink stock and options were worth hundreds of millions of dollars (which they were, once). Her boss, in turn, a former banker pretty-boy, was pure PR, no technical know-how.
Fortunately, the VP and Exec VP screwed up a release of Webmail so badly that two million people's email in-boxes got lost, duplicated, or otherwise chewed.
So Sky Dayton, then CEO, canned the fools. Then, when EarthLink's stock value plunged after the Mindspring "merger", the VP and Exec VP had used their stock as collateral on other market plays. We hope they lost everything.
Anyway, it was always EarthLink's secret strategy to peel away AOL and MSN subscribers, using them as a farm system, and giving the more sophisticated users to earthLink, which admitted that this strategy doomed EarthLink to always being #2 or #3 in dialup subscribers. But EarthLink would have lower "churn" and thus make a profit.
Anyway, all my techie friends at EarthLink lost their jobs when EarthLink outsourced to bangalore and the Philippines. The "Customer Support" people work from phone scripts; they know nothing.
But that's the answer. If MSN gives up, EarthLink will be #2 to AOL. And all three suck, in different styles, anyway.
Anybody know where Ranbir Chawla (good guy, though probably Asperger's) or Veronica Murdock (pure Evil, dressed for Success) have gone to? Inquiring minds want to know. Just post your answer here...
Mod parent fluff down please.
28.8k modem announced in mid-Feb 1993
56Kbps (v.90) didn't come out for several years after that.
I could understand this maybe, oh, two or three years ago- but not now. I run a dialup ISP that markets in these rural areas that have been previously without broadband, and the few places that it doesn't make sense for one of the wireless players to show up and take all of my business, are the same places where I can't even set up access because of the cost of installing even a fractional T1 is over $1K / month.
I guess I'm a mom and pop dialup, or at least just a one man operation with outsourced support, but I think that portion of my business will have to RIP within a few years with Netzero, wired broadband, and 802.11 networks chipping away at the customer base.
My latest market that I had to pull out my access numbers was, get this, a town with 300 people that one of the wireless broadband providers decided to set up a node in. I went from 200 customers to 20 within a matter of 6 months.
I'd rather just bank the profits and sell off all the equipment before I try and protect my markets by forcing users into contracts. Perhaps its time to just get out of that business entirely, and use my "billing week" to more productive ends.
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
> 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
Well it's about time Microsoft got Internet users to do something active while sitting in front of our computers! So when does the MSN (r) Stationary Bike (tm) - complete with gel-filled Soft Pedals (tm) for barefoot Internet surfing - go on sale? :)
The word you are looking for is peddles as in "to sell." Soft-peddles = to soft-sell (no Tainted Love here) :)
Also, AOL cant even give their service away anymore. A good friend is on dialup, and had to go elsewhere because she just couldnt get a connection. When she cancelled, they offered her up to three months free- but if you cant get thru, what good is free?
She is paying somebody (I think Earthlink) about $20/month, gets no spam (well, no more than ordinary), and isnt hit with her ISP spamming her for junk or services.
Im sure that MSN, which was pretty much based on the AOL business model, is in the same boat. Relying on advertising just seems like such a dot-com era business model. Especially when you realize that television has pretty much trained people to ignore advertising!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
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).
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
> 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.
Although I like to be the first to play the devil's advocate when it comes to MS hypocricy here I don't think that statement was necessarily hypocritcal. Mainly b/c nobody cried foul.
;)
We know this is timothy and he likes to put in his little quips in on every story and generally likes to be very anti-MS. In this case I'm wiling to give him benefit of the doubt though that he was just raising a valid point about a lack of big names in the dial-up market.
I can totally see where you would think it was him being a zealot again though
Microsoft started a $300 million marketing campaign 14 months ago to attract dial-up users, and has decided to abandon that effort.
Does it mean we'll get rid of the obnoxious butterfly commercials? I've never used their service and I do not intend to, but those commercials make me feel like grabbing the remote and turning off the TV immediately.
For mass-marketted dialup services, the soft departure of MSN from dialup will be a big hit and a boon for the other mass-market services like AOL, Earthlink, and friends--but don't forget the dialup resellers. It's still a profitable and growing business. I pay $9.95/month for unlimited dialup access through a popular USENET provider who resells the dialup service of Megapop.
Kriston
but there's no money being made in trying to corner that market.
The problem at MSN is not that they are selling dialup, but that they thought that it would be proffitabl;e to spend $314 Million on advertizing a service that sells for so little in a market that has so many competitors.
I wonder how much profit AOL actually sees from thier service. I'm guessing very little if any.
Attempting to dominate the dialup service market through extensive advertising seems more a play to attract investors or increase stock market value than it does an attempt to make an honest living.
Read, L