Slashdot Mirror
A Domain Registrar Is Starting a Fiber ISP To Compete With Comcast
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."
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.)
Tucows to bind them
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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).
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?