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A Domain Registrar Is Starting a Fiber ISP To Compete With Comcast

Posted by Soulskill on from the rise-of-the-micronetworks dept.

Jason Koebler writes: Tucows Inc., an internet company that's been around since the early 90s — it's generally known for being in the shareware business and for registering and selling premium domain names — announced that it's becoming an internet service provider. Tucows will offer fiber internet to customers in Charlottesville, Virginia — which is served by Comcast and CenturyLink — in early 2015 and eventually wants to expand to other markets all over the country. "Everyone who has built a well-run gigabit network has had demand exceeding their expectations," Elliot Noss, Tucows' CEO said. "We think there's space in the market for businesses like us and smaller."

45 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, sure, any day now... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 1

    Comcast is a behemoth that Google can barely take on. Tucows will not succeed in doing much, but over time, the efforts of Google and others like Tucows might compel Comcast to yup their game. At least in my dream. Certainly Verizon and their fios didn't have the balls...

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    1. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by houstonbofh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They are not taking on Comcast. They are taking on Charlottesville, Virginia. And Comcast has to be careful how it fights them or it can lad itself in trouble in ALL of it's other markets. (Or worse, regulated more than it is now.)

    2. Re: Yeah, sure, any day now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I for one accept our new cow overloads. Any competition against Comcast is a good thing!

    3. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      (Or worse, regulated more than it is now.)

      Yeah, because regulation hurts them and protects consumers and doesn't increase the barriers to entry in the market or anything, and of course every time regulation is on the table it's not like they spend millions lobbying for it to end up protecting themselves rather than their customers. /s

    4. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      the blurb reads like they would just resell comcast/centurylink?

      they're building their own network or no?

      (repacking crap would be right up tucows biz model)

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      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by mysidia · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And Comcast has to be careful how it fights them or it can lad itself in trouble in ALL of it's other markets.

      There is one simple way Comcast can fight them.... deliver a better service with better support at lower cost to the consumer, and do it in a way that makes the customers happier and more excited about their service than Tucows.

      It does mean Comcast has to probably offer the 1 Gigabit or better service at a lower price than what Tucows is rolling out.

      If Comcast uses any other method to fight them, then Comcast deserves to be more tightly regulated.

      Of course if Comcast actually gets competitive and causes Tucows to fail fair and square, then once there is no effective competition once again, Comcast could raise their prices or take other new actions as a result of becoming a monopoly ---- in that case, I would expect the regulators to tighten their reigns heavily and create a cap on Comcasts' revenue and requirements similar to the Telco regulations requiring the phone companies to build-out and service all customers (no cherrypicking high-revenue customers; no excluding the "Top or Bottom 2% of users" who have been deemed unprofitable customers).

    6. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

      comcast needs to have better TV as well.

    7. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I.e. if Comcast uses excess profits from everywhere else to provide ridiculously low priced service (aka walmart breaking into a new market until the competition goes out of business).. then Tucows can't win.

      I think the lines need to be built by and maintained by one company or by the municipality and the service provided by competition.

      There are good and bad points to excluding customers. It's ridiculous to run a 20 mile fiber to one person's house or even a group of five or six houses and charge them the same as everyone else. If they want cable- they should live with the rest of civilization.

      OTH, left to their own devices providers will cut "less" profitable customers over "highly profitable" customers. Which doesn't work with something that is basically a public utility.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    8. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If comcast provides better quality for lower price in Charlottesville, they're basically admitting that they sell overpriced, low-quality in the rest of the nation, which provides legal ammo to those opposed to them.
      Ofcourse, all of this would be good for consumers, competitors and pretty much everybody... except Comcast themselves.

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    9. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by quonsar · · Score: 1

      Comcast has many more congressmen than TuCows.

      --

      Sacred cows make the best burgers.

    10. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      I.e. if Comcast uses excess profits from everywhere else to provide ridiculously low priced service (aka walmart breaking into a new market until the competition goes out of business).. then Tucows can't win.

      You mean dumping? http://www.heritage.org/resear... Getting bit by this has to be Comcasts bigest fear. If it can lower price in only this market to drive tucows out of the business, it is totally screwed.

    11. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by kbrannen · · Score: 2

      I think the lines need to be built by and maintained by one company or by the municipality and the service provided by competition.

      I totally agree with you. Of course, that means that we start to treat broadband like a utility and not a private business, which is fine by me.

      There are good and bad points to excluding customers. It's ridiculous to run a 20 mile fiber to one person's house or even a group of five or six houses and charge them the same as everyone else. If they want cable- they should live with the rest of civilization.

      I think you need to think that thru a little more. Going by that logic, you're saying that farmers (who grow your food) and others who just like small town life don't deserve high-speed internet. I'm not sure what word I want to apply to that, but you don't come out looking so nice there.

      Now, if you want to say that those who live further out will need to pay a bit more because of their situation, I think most of us could agree to that. Of course, with the advent of putting access points on water towers and other high places and then a receiver/transmitter dish on the person's house so that lines don't have to be run to individual houses, even those of us not in "the big city" can get better speeds at mostly reasonable prices.

    12. Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 1

      I think you would agree that if a farmer is 20 miles from any other connection point that no company or municipality should be legally required to run that farmer a line and charge the same price as they do for a line in an urban neighborhood.

      If we decide that we want to provide that as the federal government- cool. Tho it would be pretty damn irritating to find we are running subsidized internet out to some wealthy lady's wilderness estate because she put in 10 acres of hay.

      There are alternative solutions (like satellite) but they are more expensive. And that's the trade off you get for living away from other people. You can't share services and costs. You don't pay city taxes.

      Everything we decide to do is a trade off. Alaskan Fishermen who are maimed and even killed while fishing for us don't get inexpensive high speed internet either. Neither do game wardens living in remote lodges in national parks. And we don't provide any of them the same level of police, fire, and water service either.

      It's not a question of saying they do or do not deserve it. It's prioritization of limited resources. Do you run high speed internet to Fred the Farmer for $20,000 or do you pave a street or buy a new fire engine or buy the new police cruiser?

      Especially when changes in technology may allow Fred the farmer to have high speed internet for $120 a month in a couple years.

      But if we had unlimited resources- sure. Give the farmer's high speed internet with no extra charge for the extra hardware they require.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  2. High throughput spamvertising! by damn_registrars · · Score: 1

    Tucows had a reputation for some time as a registrar who was very spammer-friendly. Are they going to sell bandwidth to the spammers as well to get a cut of that action too? It is noted that they just managed to spamvertise their own services here on the slashdot front page as well...

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    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:High throughput spamvertising! by houstonbofh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Filthy shameless spammer. Still a better love story that Twilight... ^H I mean still a better choice than Comcast.

  3. One cow to rule them all! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Tucows to bind them

  4. Hmm... Charlottesville wouldn't be a bad place... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

    ...except for all those Wahoos.

    Seriously, it's a cool town, in a beautiful setting. We've been happy as clams with our Ting (also from Tucows) mobile service, and we've wanted for a long time to move back to the Virginia hills. Hmm...

  5. ABC (Anyone But Comcast) by ZipK · · Score: 2

    We live with DSL speed from a local ISP rather than deal with Comcast or AT&T. We'd be plenty happy to see a gigabit service from another provider!

    1. Re:ABC (Anyone But Comcast) by KittehJeff · · Score: 3, Informative

      I dont' know i had 3mbit from verizon and it was pretty nice, then we got comcast, 6mbit, was pretty ncie, i had 150mbit and I barely notice any speed. Dropped to 50mbit and still don't notice a difference. The internet is just so bogged down now a days, we just need to clean up the latency more than anything.

  6. Ah Tucows... by Dwedit · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ah...Tucows...
    Download anything from them and it will be loaded with extra adware with a very tricky sequence of clicks to not install any of it. Yes, this even means not agreeing what looks like a license agreement, but is actually an offer to install crap.

    I'd probably take even Comcast over them.

    1. Re:Ah Tucows... by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 1

      I dont know, my roommates are on Ting mobile (run by Tucows), and they find it pretty good. I wouldnt be surprised if their fiber ISP falls is run under their Ting subsidiary too.

    2. Re:Ah Tucows... by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      Have you been to Cnet lately? They used to be the place to download shareware / freeware back in the early 2000s and prior. Back in the 90s, CNet was the premier place to go for all the latest in computing news and internet fads (along with ZDnet). Back then, Weatherbug was spyware and AVG was the anti-virus of choice. Now the Internet is all flipped upside-down. Cnet contains links to dubious apps and tricks you into some download app, WeatherBug is clean (and awesome), and AVG contains a craptastic IE toolbar that's impossible to remove completely without resorting ripping it out manually via some utility like Autoruns.

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      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:Ah Tucows... by joelgrimes · · Score: 1

      It is under Ting. The link in TFS is www.tucows.com/ting-acquires-bri/

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      Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
    4. Re:Ah Tucows... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      That wasn't your room mates, that was a tucows spam bot pretending to be your room mates who love their new Ting mobile service and their LOW LOW PRICES!

    5. Re:Ah Tucows... by neminem · · Score: 1

      That is extremely incorrect.

      This is going to be run by the people that run the Sprint MVNO Ting (which is owned by Tucows). Ting is *awesome*. They pretty much define what customer service and user experience should look like. I've been with them for over a year now, and they are one of a small handful of companies I go out of my way to proselytize to people.

      I would switch to this in an *instant* if I could, and if their rates are reasonable, which I expect they will be, given that it will be run by Ting.

      I do remember the Tucows of the mid-90s being as you described, but the Tucows of today is nothing like that.

    6. Re:Ah Tucows... by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

      Have you downloaded Java lately? Bundling bullshit seems to be required in any software install on Windows now.

  7. tucows midi song by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    on a long shot, im going to ask if anyone knows where to find the midi song that tucows used as an example in a tutorial for how to embed music in html. this is going way back to circa 2001, i tried searching for it a few years ago but no luck. that midi song was iconic to me in my youth when i was learning html and i really wish i could find it again for nastalgia sake. thank you to anyone who knows what im talking about :)

  8. Tucows start by glitch! · · Score: 1

    Tucows Inc., an internet company that's been around since the early 90s â" it's generally known for being in the shareware business and for registering and selling premium domain names ...

    In 1997, Tucows was starting to get attention at ISPCON. Network Solutions _WAS_ the only registrar since General Atomics and ??? abandoned the domain registration game. Kim was at the top. Then the fees went from $100 to $70 and there was limited competition. Tucows was a competitor, but not a good one. I remember, because I did not choose them for my domain registrations. For those interested in Kim, she went on to ICANN and was a force to deal with when getting a /19. Those who don't know what a /19 is can just move on...

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    A dingo ate my sig...
    1. Re:Tucows start by markhb · · Score: 2

      General Atomics and the original AT&T were the other parts of InterNIC, but only Network Solutions provided registration services (rs.internic.net). IIRC, AT&T's role was to supply Directory services and General Atomics were to supply some services that they failed miserably at, which got them booted out of the contract.

      Wasn't the original head of Tucows (The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software I believe it stood for) a guy named Scott? Is he still there?

      --
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  9. Holy Crap by rogoshen1 · · Score: 2

    Tucows is still around??? I remember downloading crap from them in 1995. A quick google shows that not much has changed in the intervening 19 years.

    Does their fiber service come with the signature bloatware as well?

    (Side note, it's interesting to see internet companies that ostensibly have no reason to exist, yet are still alive and .. sorta-kinda-maybe-kicking today. Lycos for example. I'm frankly gobsmacked that they might wind up outliving their labby mascot. Or askjeeves, no quasi-witty joke needed.)

    1. Re:Holy Crap by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Informative

      They're around in some indirect sense, but the current company named "Tucows" is mostly a different one. Tucows was a Michigan-based internet company that in 2001 was acquired by a Toronto-based company, Infonautics. Infonautics subsequently changed its own name to Tucows, because it was a better-recognized brand. So the current Tucows is largely a rebranded Infonautics, and still headquartered in Toronto. But, it does also own the former Tucows assets as well, so they persist in that sense.

      Businesses that have gone through as many rounds of acquisitions and mergers as this one have are a bit Frankensteinish, so it's hard to say what is new or old or mashed up together.

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      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    2. Re:Holy Crap by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 2

      Sort of like how the current Atari is nothing to do with the 1980s Atari except for the name and the logo. Short version though, I think increased competition like this can only be a good thing. If small companies start doing fiber buildouts, it'll kick the incumbents like Comcast into having to step up their game to compete rather than just sitting on their backsides collecting rents. It's already happened in the areas Google Fiber showed up.

    3. Re:Holy Crap by grumpy_old_grandpa · · Score: 1

      Businesses that have gone through as many rounds of acquisitions and mergers as this one have are a bit Frankensteinish, so it's hard to say what is new or old or mashed up together.

      Sort of like how Nokia used to be an old lumberjack and milling company, then produced rubber and car tires, then mobile phones, and finally went on to become a brothel for Microsoft executives who fetishize pale Finnish developers, developers, developers...

    4. Re:Holy Crap by Anarchduke · · Score: 1

      omg i had no idea lycos was still alive. i had forgotten their name entirely

      --
      who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
    5. Re:Holy Crap by L.+J.+Beauregard · · Score: 1

      "Ask Jeeves" still exists as ask.com, which is infamous for bundling their malware with Oracle's Java updates. I have blocked them at the router.

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  10. Windows Update by tepples · · Score: 1

    What does it matter what they put in IE. If you never use IE, you never see the toolbar.

    Back in the day, IE was the only way to get to Windows Update.

    1. Re:Windows Update by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Back in the day, Microsoft's homepage had a gopher link.

  11. Re:The prophesy is fulfilled! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Comcast as Lucifer? The Prince of Darkness? Source of all Evil?
    That's really insulting to Satan.

  12. Yay! competition. by psherman2001 · · Score: 1

    How can it be a bad thing?

  13. Amazingly, no. by Overzeetop · · Score: 1

    Yes, I know; the joke about SV having shit service, but...Colleges are well wired, the towns around them are often not. Virginia Tech - the "electronic village" - that was supposed to get 10bT to every home over a decade ago - STILL has ISP-by-address. If you're lucky you get Verizon 7/768 AND Comcast, but many places have a single provider. And there is basically no fiber. The only competition I've seen is from a rural telecom who stopped by one day while running new service to a select few, and they could get you T1-speed service (1.5/1.5) for the bargain price of $120/mo. AYFKM?

    The town looked into high speed but decided it was too difficult to exercise their rights of way and didn't want to piss off Comcast, so they scuttled 100Mb fiber to everyone. I think they may still be meeting once a month to talk about "high speed internet" but they'll never get anything done about it.

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    Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
  14. They've come a long way ... by ubrgeek · · Score: 2

    I vaguely recall their early tagline as being "The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software" before branching out to things like being a registrar.

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    Bark less. Wag more.
  15. Re:Wrong town by michrech · · Score: 1

    I live in a small college town. The college I work for has two 1GB lines going to it (I'm not sure what the other couple colleges have). The town itself is served by AT&T (I can get a whopping 3Mbit at my house!), CableONE (which is what I use - 50/3), and a fixed wireless provider.

    It'd be awesome if someone would come in and offer a Google Fiber-like service (and by 'like', I mean 1GB for roughly $70 a month)...

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    bork bork bork!
  16. I wonder... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ...when the sheeple will realize that having gigabit fiber internet won't make everything faster....

    they still don't realize it's limited to the speed of the sites they visit...

    heh

  17. Tucows - good and bad by wytcld · · Score: 1

    Tucows has Ting cell service - which if you don't mind being on Sprint's network is quite a bargain, and the staff is friendly. They also have the Hover retail registrar - which refused to support DNSSEC for domains registered there, even if you run your own DNS, unless you pay them $500 per domain for their help with it. Management at Hover is hostile to users.

    --
    "with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
  18. Re:The prophesy is fulfilled! by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

    Comcast as Lucifer? The Prince of Darkness? Source of all Evil?

    Not the source... Just a common carrier...