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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
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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