I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but I just recently left my job at Bell. While you may say that they could support however many money squandering projects for the next 20 years and not notice, you need to understand the situation that has happened in Bell over the past year or so, and what that has created.
A few years back a guy who was CEO of Bell, Mr. Jean Monty, decided that convergence was the way of the future, so he had Bell buy up big stakes in the three major media, TV, Print, and Internet. After a few years of pushing hard to make this work, and spending BUTTLOADS of money, without ever turning a profit from many of the divisions, investors were wondering what was going on. Fast forward to late 2001/early 2002. Jean Monty resigns, apologizing for the failure that is Convergence. Mr. Michael Sabia takes over, vowing to take Bell back to it's "roots" and become a money making machine again.
This is where my job goes down the drain - don't get me wrong, I didn't get fired (I wish, I could have taken the severance and had another job the next day... DOH!). However, I worked for BGMi, doing server admin for sympatico.ca, and with the decision to make Bell into a money making machine, anything that wasn't profitable was out. This took a large part of our future plans for sympatico and tossed them to the wind. My job implementing new services became stagnant, I was bored, and I left - the same day that approximately 10% of the company was laid off.
So, essentially what I'm trying to get across here is that with the direction that Bell is going, they're not going to throw money to the wind, not for a long long time. You don't want to know how much they sank into things like sympatico.ca, and that's money that they aren't going to get back any time soon.
If this wireless service is going to stick around, Bell is going to figure out a way to make it pay for itself. It won't stay free, guaranteed. In fact, if there isn't enough interest, I'm sure these access points will just disappear come March.
It's a cool idea, but we need to support it if we want to see it available after the trial run.
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I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but I just recently left my job at Bell. While you may say that they could support however many money squandering projects for the next 20 years and not notice, you need to understand the situation that has happened in Bell over the past year or so, and what that has created.
A few years back a guy who was CEO of Bell, Mr. Jean Monty, decided that convergence was the way of the future, so he had Bell buy up big stakes in the three major media, TV, Print, and Internet. After a few years of pushing hard to make this work, and spending BUTTLOADS of money, without ever turning a profit from many of the divisions, investors were wondering what was going on. Fast forward to late 2001/early 2002. Jean Monty resigns, apologizing for the failure that is Convergence. Mr. Michael Sabia takes over, vowing to take Bell back to it's "roots" and become a money making machine again.
This is where my job goes down the drain - don't get me wrong, I didn't get fired (I wish, I could have taken the severance and had another job the next day... DOH!). However, I worked for BGMi, doing server admin for sympatico.ca, and with the decision to make Bell into a money making machine, anything that wasn't profitable was out. This took a large part of our future plans for sympatico and tossed them to the wind. My job implementing new services became stagnant, I was bored, and I left - the same day that approximately 10% of the company was laid off.
So, essentially what I'm trying to get across here is that with the direction that Bell is going, they're not going to throw money to the wind, not for a long long time. You don't want to know how much they sank into things like sympatico.ca, and that's money that they aren't going to get back any time soon.
If this wireless service is going to stick around, Bell is going to figure out a way to make it pay for itself. It won't stay free, guaranteed. In fact, if there isn't enough interest, I'm sure these access points will just disappear come March.
It's a cool idea, but we need to support it if we want to see it available after the trial run.