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Comments on news posted 2000-12-13 01:56:40: A quick reference on the troubled state of the ISP/CLEC market.. if you have news you think should be added here, please submit it, confidentiality guaranteed.
Updates (June 29th)
BlueStar, Capu. ..
|
 | | In due time.... It won't take long for alot of those companies to die or be taken over. I love how only 1 small cable company is among them though 
--
Hey, I can call my ma from up here.....
Hey ma ! Get off the damn roof. | |
| | | |  Re: In due time....
| |
| | | | | Re: In due time.... I guess we'll find out....
--
There are 3 types of people: those who can count, and those who can't. | |
| | | | | The fact that DSL in the US is in shambles everywhere is a good sign. You can't just believe things will work out, wish you could, but there has been a pattern of them losing money for a long time, and its not changing all of a sudden.
--
Hey, I can call my ma from up here.....
Hey ma ! Get off the damn roof. | |
| | | | | | Re: In due time.... before to long there are going to be only 2 or three dsl providers besides the telcos | |
|
| | | "I love how only 1 small cable company is among them though"
That's because the author of this article didn't do a complete job.
Might I remind you, ISP Channel is like @Home and Roadrunner -- an ISP for local cable companies. Their main problem is that they partnered w/ small companies, many of which have really bad offerings (crappy lines, etc). ISP Channel can't control that, any more than @Home or RoadRunner can control what their catv companies have for equipment.
AT&T is breaking up in (probably) 4 parts, and the word at Western Show last week (catv convention) was that the catv division would be sold to the other strong catv players (Comcast, Cox, et al).
In addition, HSA (Charter's ISP) and @Home (AT&T et al's ISP) are on Downside Magazine's death watch http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html . Juno (just signed up to be a Comcast ISP) is also struggling and on the deathwatch. | |
| | |  justinAustralian
join:1999-05-28
New York, NY
kudos:7
IPv6
Business Connectiv..
Console/Handheld g..
Console Tech
Home/Office setup ..
| Re: In due time.... I wrote it, but was not intending it to cover Cable company financial health. ISPChannel was the only company in obvious enough difficulty to mention.
By standards that would include AT&T and Excite@Home, practically EVERY US communications oriented company would be mentioned. | |
| | |  JestocostThe Poodle Bites.
join:2000-10-19
Saint Louis, MO | It's important to note that HSA is Charter's ISP in only a few markets, many of them not major Charter markets. See my post here for details: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,230652;root=charter;mode=flat
In other areas it could be Earthlink, or RoadRunner or, I have heard, even @Home.
It's worth looking at RoadRunner as one possibly troubled cable provider, given that their exclusive relationship with TWC is ending. No clear indication as to the long-term impact of that move, but keep it on the radar screens. | |
| | | | JestocostThe Poodle Bites.
join:2000-10-19
Saint Louis, MO | Re: In due time.... Also, HSA is one of Paul Allen's companies and has easier access to additional financing than many of the completely independent ISPs. | |
|
| | Anon | You love how there is only one small cable company in the list, you say?
Do you know that cable companies are well funded AND got into the cable internet game already with a ton of cable TV subscribers?
Just because there are no cable companies in the list doesn't mean they are doing good. They just so happen to have a heavy influx of cashflow from an existing business.
Its NOT because they are doing any better at broadband than DSL. | |
|
jydub
join:2000-10-17
Nashua, NH | Telocity? What about Telocity. The reports for them are coming in with more and more in the mixed and horror side. Is their tech support getting overtaxed? They've got this massive campaign going on with mailings and advertisements. They're another DSL provider with a great IPO (last spring?) and then suffered a stock price tank, down to 2 bucks. It's seems they're surviving, but I hear very little about them. BTW, They're my provider (shared adsl 640/90 through Verizon) and I've found them very good. Always there, 99% uptime. I used tech support a couple times (via e-mail) and the response was pretty lame. | |
| | | | Re: Telocity? Telocity is a decent provider overall. They provide absolutely the best (although proprietary) modems, and don't have restrictions of home networks/web servers as some ISP's choose to do. AND they pay their bills (probably Rhythms crown jewel customer).
Despite loosing money, they are actually meeting their targets- the losses were planned to accomidate their massive growth projections. The difference is they can't sell their reserve stock at $50 into the market anymore to cover losses and provide operating cash. So the whole show for investors (ultimately customers too) is waiting to see if they can line up funding by March or April 2001- their projected cash-out date. | |
| | justinAustralian
join:1999-05-28
New York, NY
kudos:7 Host:
IPv6
Business Connectiv..
Console/Handheld g..
Console Tech
Home/Office setup ..
| I remembered Telocity last night and added it this morning. Indeed, their cash-out date looks uncomfortably close. I can't imagine anyone getting fresh funding then. They would have to merge/be acquired/sell out or do something else drastic to continue.
Thats just my opinion from looking at the 10-Q though, as they say on the financial boards, do your own DD. | |
| | | JestocostThe Poodle Bites.
join:2000-10-19
Saint Louis, MO | Re: Telocity? Yep. With $75MM cash on hand and a loss of $38MM in the most recent quarter, it doesn't take much to figure out that there's potential trouble on the horizon. Salomon Smith Barney cited concerns over Telocity's viability in the downgrade on Rhythms that they issued Monday. According to SSB, Telocity and Flashcom account for 33 percent of Rhythms installed lines and 40 percent of their 3Q00 new lines. | |
| | | | | Isn't Telocity backed by NBC? Shouldn't that help? | |
| | | | JestocostThe Poodle Bites.
join:2000-10-19
Saint Louis, MO | Re: Telocity? NBC, NBCi and affiliated companies invested about $70 million in cash and advertising (TV and online) for a 20 percent stake in Telocity. At today's prices, that stake is worth about $32 million. Absent anything that we don't know about, I'd find it difficult to believe that NBC would pour any more cash into the company. | |
|
| tommy3d
join:2000-12-05
Fort Lauderdale, FL | Telocity is the worst. I thought Bellsouth was bad, but Telocity is the worst company that I have ever dealt with in any field. Their tech support will lie to you. Their supervisors (haha) will lie to you. I have been connected with them for about a month, and I have been down EVERY DAY. It took three weeks for them to transfer my domain to their DNS servers. I am in the process of changing carriers. The only reason I am able to write this is because I am at work. My home telocity is DOWN!!!!! | |
| | | | | Re: Telocity? I think it has to do with other things cause my friend signed up for Telocity and he had the best installation and couldn't be happier. He signed up and in 2 weeks they came out and installed his line and told him he would get at least an 800k connection and then they said he'd get his modem in like 2 weeks and it came like 4 days later. Installed it via USB and worked like a charm. 1 minor problem at the beginning of the installation of the modem but tech support cleared all that up. Now he's happy and has had service for about 3 weeks at speeds around 800k.
--
Brad
»www.fscigroup.com | |
|
| Anon |  Whats the Local ISP to do?
| |
| | jydub
join:2000-10-17
Nashua, NH | Re: Whats the Local ISP to do? My old ISP started offering DSL through Verizon, the local telco. It cost 10 dollars more than Verizon's service and they want you to buy the modem and filters for 300 bucks! I'm not sure if they've sold any of this service, but I didn't buy it. The only advantage would have been keeping the same ISP, domain name, e-mail, etc...
In the end, though, this ISP (and others like them) may be the only one around since we can only assume the telcos will always be around. | |
|
 urbmanPhasers Locked On Target
join:1999-06-25
Niagara Falls, NY | What the experts predict?? With all the dsl turmoil, why is it that the experts are still predicting dsl will win out over cable? I used to be a big dsl supporter but since getting cable and reading the reviews I am beginning to wonder. Don't get me wrong I think that dsl is a better product when it works. Besides that will the deregulation of both cable and phone, I don't see how the local telcos could even offer cable over a dsl line with the quality at present. I have heard that in Mass, AT+T is offering local phone service over cable lines? If the cable companies can get that going will the phone companies be able to catch up?
--
The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. | |
| | | | Re: What the experts predict?? You really have to look at the big picture of broadband. It's not you or me surfing the web and downloading MP3's that pay the bills, It's the small to medium sized business that buys the connection, hosting and other e-business oriented services that keep these companies operating. Up until recent offerings no cable company has been selling small business services. It's all been consumer based connections without an SLA. I don't know about you but if my company relied on it's internet connection to function I would need some sort of service agreement and guaranteed bandwidth. A company that was paying $1000-$2000 a month for a T1 can now get the same bandwidth for $300-$500 a month with the same SLA they got on the T1
--
You are here "X" and have no one to blame but yourself ! | |
| | | | AT&T Phone over Cable I was under the impression that AT&T was rolling this out nationwide. See www.digitalphone.att.com | |
| | | urbmanPhasers Locked On Target
join:1999-06-25
Niagara Falls, NY | Re: AT&T Phone over Cable Cool thanks for the link.
--
The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. | |
|
|  lml2000Whazzup
join:2000-08-17
Los Angeles, CA | Re: What the experts predict?? urb:
I think you confusing "turmoil" for quality of service, when it really is referring to financial stability of many of these CLEC operations. Much of the problems now experienced by CLECs and their DSL ISPs are financial. These CLECs obtained too much money too quickly from bankers, and has a result spent it much too quickly focusing on market share rather than the bottom line. Well, now the money spicket has been turned off, and those operations that are not profitable will soon wither on the vine and either die or seek a big fish with cash flow. Cash is now king in the DSL business. Expect some consolidation and some permanent Ch. 7 liquidations. But DSL is here to stay, and in many respects, particularly to professionals and more serious residential users, DSL will continue to offer a superior platform, but might cost a bit more than cable for such superiority.
Cable, OTOH, will cater to residential users and will likely operate at the lowest common denominator until the subscriber base starts to complain with a loud roar. If you're fortunate to live in an area with superior cable plant and few subscribers, your service is bound to be superior to a traditional ADSL line. But don't expect the nirvana to last forever. For $25-30 per month, you cannot expect your MSO to deliver to you a 5-10 Mbps pipe forever. Most likely, going forward, the QoS of your cable connection will continue to dwindle, and periodically improve when the cable company decides to add a node. But I submit as the network grows larger, and more complex, on the margin each additional node will result in less and less improvement in QoS, and that with increased complexity brought on by the increased number of subscribers, problems on the network will increase exponentially.
So, which is better, DSL or cable? It depends. It depends upon where you live, your local plant situation; who your provider or MSO is, etc. Do you live close to your telco's CO? Who is your ISP and what is the unused capacity on their network? Are you willing to pay a bit more for superior service? Is your MSO a quality operation? If so, how new is their cable plant? How many subs do the permit on a single node? How often or how willing is the MSO to add a node when local traffic in the coax in your street gets congested during peak periods? Do they know what they're doing? IMHO, many MSOs know little about 2-way systems; they pretend to know, but have considerable less experience than the telcos. You be your own judge.
--
Regards,
lml | |
|
 Bobo$Silvio DanteMod 2001-02
join:2000-08-30
Holland, MI
|  Some More...? + notes
DSL.Net
...can't remember exactly, but I think there's one or two more rattling around in there...
...and there has been news about Rhythms: despite stock plunge along with every other DCLEC listed, Cisco pumped another $50 million into their coffers just last month. Unusual turn of events for a company receiving an equal "vote of no confidence" as their competitors from the market. Considering Cisco's reputation (and product line!!!!) I'm left wondering whether the stock price is telling the whole story with Rhythms, and perhaps they have a better chance of survival than the others.
Plus, for both Northpoint and Rhythms it is notable that the "ISP can't pay their bills problem" does not extend to either of those companies them (that I've heard). One wonders why Covad alone and Northpoint suffer this particular ailment, but Rhythms does not? Note: if you've got evidence to correct this statement about Rhythms, put it up, but if it's no more than "the stock price plunged so the market assumed" I will hold my correction until I see some actual press or numbers. More than happy to stand corrected: just has to be supported. Thank you!
[text was edited by author 2000-12-06 12:51:31] | |
| |  dru
join:2000-09-14
Corona, CA | Re: Some More...? + notes said by Bobo:
Jato Communications
DSL.Net
...can't remember exactly, but I think there's one or two more rattling around in there...
CLEC New Edge Networks had a large layoff recently.
quote:
Plus, for both Northpoint and Rhythms it is notable that the "ISP can't pay their bills problem" does not extend to either of those companies (that I've heard). One wonders why Covad alone suffers this particular ailment?
This is incorrect. Northpoint issued a similar correction and revised revenue regarding receivables they were unable to collect from companies like Flashcom. Northpoint simply has the "Verizon" play taking most of the attention. Rhythms is assumed to have the same issues and is being punished in the markets. | |
| | | |
Plus, for both Northpoint and Rhythms it is notable that the "ISP can't pay their bills problem" does not extend to either of those companies (that I've heard). One wonders why Covad alone suffers this particular ailment?
You must have missed Northpoint oops in Q3. Two down, one to go.
--
Jim Seymour & Karel the Computer Cat
Agents Provocateurs Extraordinaire | |
| | | | quote:
Plus, for both Northpoint and Rhythms it is notable that the "ISP can't pay their bills problem" does not extend to either of those companies (that I've heard). One wonders why Covad alone suffers this particular ailment?
Northpoint has indeed suffered from this, as they have already "re-stated their earnings" (uh, they wrote off bad debt). This is what led Verizion to back out of their agreement, and why Northpoint's stock bottomed out at 1% of its 52-week high. Rhythms isn't saying anything, but since they provide service to some of the same ISPs then they are suspect as well (as demonstrated by their stock price). | |
| | JestocostThe Poodle Bites.
join:2000-10-19
Saint Louis, MO | According to Salomon Smith Barney, who downgraded Rhythms earlier this week, Flashcom and Telocity account for 33 percent of Rhythms installed lines and 40 percent of their new lines in 3Q00. With Flashcom's status well documented and Telocity two quarters away from running out of cash at their current burn rate, that's a scary picture for Rhythms. In fact, SSB specifically cited concerns about Telocity's viability in their downgrade of Rhythms. | |
| | | Bobo$Silvio DanteMod 2001-02
join:2000-08-30
Holland, MI |  Re: Some More...? + notes
| |
| | | |
See 6 replies to this post |
| | And the Anti-Inexperienced ISP...?
:-P~
-T.J. | |
| | | and PSN? | |
| | | | Re: and PSN? | |
| | | | | Re: and PSN? | |
| | | | | Rumor says(call tech support yourself and ask for real story):
They oversold their bandwidth in the west coast so they reroute their network to east coast. And somewhere along the line people screwed things up(surprise?).
After a week I still dont have my DSL in DC. oh well...don't know if I'll ever get my credit from PSN.
--SEU | |
|
| | | Spoke with PSN customer service rep. She informed me that next week I will receive a notice from NP regarding a switch to another ISP. I live in Maryland and have had problems for over 60 days now. SO...I guess the stories about PSN biting the dust have some truth to them. I'll be glad to switch just to bet my DSL service up and running again. | |
| | | | |  Re: and PSN? TELOCITY & NORTHPOINT CONTACTED ME
CHECK EMAILS | |
|
JestocostThe Poodle Bites.
join:2000-10-19
Saint Louis, MO | Prodigy?
Does this show that even the RBOCs don't have a handle on how to manage the ISP end of things? Has anybody figured out how to make that side of the business profitable? | |
| | | What about Bazillion?
--
Brad
»www.fscigroup.com | |
| | | | Re: What about Bazillion?
They might be having problems, b/c they are one of Covad's distressed partners. | |
| | | | | Re: What about Bazillion? Actually I think they're looking for funding now too. We talked to someone who worked there. We'll see what happens. | |
| | |
| I just got off the phone with Covad. According to the person I talked to, Bazillion is not on their distressed ISP list.
Correction: Ok, so the person I talked to was wrong. I've called back twice now and talked to two different people at Covad. Both confirmed that Bazillion is on the distressed ISP list.
[text was edited by author 2000-12-15 10:01:23] | |
| | | | | Anon | Re: What about Bazillion?
They do need to improve their Tech support line though!
-Matt | |
|
 CylonRedPremium,MVM
join:2000-07-06
Bloom County | OOUCH..... DSL Networks - word has it, as yet unconfirmed, that DSL Networks has laid off 50% of staff and closed down all offices except for San Fran head office.
This affects me - I was hoping (still am) that because they charged more and was mainly a business provider that they would be spared....... Oh well - tech support was crappy anyway and piongs are horrible. I just maybe saying "Ameritech here I come......."
--
Brian
CylonRed on Onlineracing.net
"This one goes to..... 11" | |
| | | It's a damn Shame
-------------
This is my .sig. There are many other like it, but this one is mine. | |
| |
| Re: It's a damn Shame
[text was edited by moderator] | |
| | | | | Re: It's a damn Shame | |
|
 halo5
join:2000-07-20
Dayton, OH | Internet Express? Damn!!! Well, thats my provider. Didn't expect it since I've gotten the full 1.5/384 30ms for the past 7 months with no problems really at all. I wonder if it's because this months bill is a weeks late due to xmas  .
I hope it holds on for the next month or so, TimeWarner has been laying the fiber and hardware in my neighborhood for about a month now. The guys doing it said it should be up by the end of January. (fingers crossed)
halo
--
Hmmmmm...DSL? | |
| |
See 10 replies to this post | |
| Anon | @Link?
- Chris | |
| | | Anon |  @Link? Yes!
Since September's install in Rockford, we have had maybe 30 minutes of down-time.
We are splitting a 1.5Mb dl/768 Mb ul line among 30 users via switch, with an average of six to ten using the line at any time. Works great! Also comes with static IP.
Worked within 45 minutes of installation. We bought our own firewall, and that works fine with it, too. | |
|
 L0GiXWhen all else fails, theres always L0GiXPremium
join:2000-06-30
South Bay,CA
| Need to add a new field to the isp reviews.
One of the Biggies will buy Northpoint or Covad and Rhythms will probably just disappear into nothing.
Broadband is shrinking fast people. Start to wonder if your ISP is stable enough to support you through the end of the year.
--
Hey, what's that beeping noise? Wheres that smoke coming from?
[text was edited by author 2001-01-15 22:23:03] | |
| | Anon | RE: Where's that Smoke Coming From Don't mind that, that's just NorthPoint going up in smoke, or down in flames, which ever you prefer. Next! | |
|
| Dead deathwatch?!? -- for a dead pool/deathwatch, this list is kinda' begging for an update.
[text was edited by author 2001-08-31 23:23:41] | |
| | | The Covad takeover of InternetConnect I never did like sad endings.
With Covad Communications' acquisition of InternetConnect practically complete,
I am saddened by the end of a company that felt like an ex-wife to me. As many
days as I had, frustrated to tears at the standards and practices there, both
as an employee and a customer, I loved the people there. I believed in their
products. I enjoyed working for their founder and President and it was with
mixed feelings that I left because I did have my own career to take into
consideration. I did see doom on the horizon. However, that didn't make it
any less painful to leave the company with the red billboards coast to coast.
The company that gave me a chance to become the IT professional that I am
today. The many, many familiar faces. The fact that I even fell in love with
one of the directors. The love-hate feelings I had while working there left me
feeling like a divorced husband.
I worked there for two years, to the day and was hired when they occupied the
Northeast corner suite on the 20th floor of the Wilshire tower where the
company got its start. Before our takeover of the two adjacent suites, before
the move to GeoCities' old headquarters in Marina del Rey, prior to the move to
the Epson Printer building across the street from the Torrance Police
Department. When there was a sales man and his manager, two guys in technical
support, a single person handling billing, customer service, and collections,
and, my old-school, network engineer boss (for six months) was a cantankerous
voice on the speakerphone. The data center was an 85 degree back office with
desktop towers underneath and on top of utility tables, between which, two
telco racks that housed routers and the Redback switch to be the origin of the
company's premier product, DSL.
The situation between a start-up and its employee is somewhat of an
embarrassing agreement. This is especially so if you are a tech. It's the
understanding that the employee probably doesn't have the experience, let alone
the college degree or even a diploma to work at a long-standing, reputable IT
firm--but, that employee wants to learn. It is also the understanding that the
start-up firm probably doesn't have the money for a more experienced or
educated tech. Not unless, of course that high-end IT person is led to believe
the company will end up big some day and they've been promised a high level
position from the start like CTO, Director of IT, etc.
So, both parties are in the precarious situation of evaluating two things; the
employer needs to trust that just because he or she is new doesn't mean they're
unqualified. So, they have to look at things like ambition, history, and what
they're doing. Sometimes they have to go through a bunch of bad apples before
they find one who is interested in helping the company grow. While on the
other hand, an employee might put in long hours for below-industry standard pay
that they, albeit, agreed to given the fact they can't command major IT
salaries for whatever reason. However, they could also be the victims of many
circumstances. For example, incompetent people could run the company so
they eventually go out of business and your effort is for naught.
That's what happened to many during the dot-com collapse era. In many ways,
however, InternetConnect was not just another dot-com, for better or for worse.
One of the ways is that employees hired before they left Wilshire hit a glass
ceiling due to many factors. The main factor was that, in the interest of
attracting investors, we inherited foreign upper-level management from Nextel's
southwest operations upon moving to Marina del Rey. At this time, we had
everything from a new CEO to VPs of Customer Operations and Sales with an
injection of customer service representatives to become the new Installation
Coordination department.
This was good news in the way of bringing order to our chaotic operations.
This, however, stunted the growth of employees that deserved promotion because
of their determination to do a good job in the face of what appeared to be a
never-ending trial of phone problems, angry customers, and shrinking
office-space. Everybody who didn't quit before the move to Marina del Rey went
through hell, and came back for more--even on weekends.
While debuting the DSL product, I became the sole member of the technical
support department because one of the three men in the department quit at the
beginning of 1999 and my partner went onto create what would become the
Provisioning Department. Provisioning, at the time, operated in the same
capacity as the Installation Coordination department to come later that year.
The CTO hired two directors and one manager from a telco company where he used
to work. The idea was to bring sanity to the technical operation of the
company. One of those three ended up being my boss and, eventually, I did get
help. A total of four employees were hired to join me as technical support
representatives.
Somehow, my position ended up directly on top of the fault line of an issue that
proved to be the nagging tooth ache in the would-be DSL giant. Webhosting.
DSL eventually got streamlined into a logical process: the sales department
took the order, installation coordination worked with our partners and the
customer until the service was completed, provisioning would create the
service, billing would bill it and technical support would support it. (Henry
Ford's ingenious assembly-line process in action.)
Not webhosting.
The order, coordination with the customer and our partner (Network Solutions in
this case), the creation of the service _AND_ the support of that product
through incoming phone calls, e-mail and trouble tickets rested in the hands of
my department.
I was the only person in that department, the webhosting department, from about
April 1999 until about late October when my boss hired a temp to help with the
non-technical aspect of my duties that reduced the number of suicidal thoughts
I had (just kidding). It really was that bad, though. Once, I caught the flu
in October of that year and nobody noticed that orders for websites and their
e-mail addresses were piling up for three weeks. Customers were livid and our
sales people were so infuriated by this that, I think, if it weren't for a
programmer there at the time, one of our sales guys was going to take me out
back and deck me. Finally, I get that temp.
Despite my warnings, management was constantly waiting until circumstances
reached a critical condition before conceiving and implementing solutions.
Long after we'd hired the temp. permanently and two others, plus a transfer
from technical support department and then hired two more temps, eventually
permanently--we finally did something right... Almost.
There was an attempt to integrate webhosting into the provisioning department
and push off the jobs of taking the order, coordinating it, and supporting it
to the same departments that did the same things for our DSL service. However,
this failed when both installation coordination and technical support engaged
in passive resistance, essentially refusing to learn the process. The excuse
was that they "don't know this webhosting stuff" which flies in the face of the
fact that almost all of them used to be cell phone customer support people
before coming over here to start working something they didn't know:
high-capacity leased lines. However, the blame lies with the other fact that
executives elected to roll over on the issue. Instead of saying, "You learned
DSL, you'll learn webhosting," me and my tiny band of stooges were back to being
a smaller, duplicate copy of the rest of the company, minus systems
administration, marketing, sales and billing.
Installation coordination received folders containing an order form for DSL and
another one for webhosting but for some reason, the webhosting forms were being
lost, lying on someone's desk unprocessed, etc.
Technical support would receive telephone calls for webhosting issues but the
standard practice was to issue a trouble ticket with little or no information
other than a statement with the equivalent of "customer is pissed, call soon."
Instead of training these two departments, the responsibilities were just
shifted back to us.
The end result was that issues were routinely escalated to top brass. This
caused the heat of a spotlight to come down my tiny gang because it looked like
we were falling down on the job from the hundreds of tickets pending.
It goes against my nature as a tech. to receive a request to resolve an issue
and ignore it while promising the customer the problem will be corrected.
However, that is what I was asked to do to more quickly close trouble tickets.
Half the time, the issue concerned a matter of our back-end infrastructure and
getting an answer out of the systems administration group was virtually
impossible. Usually because they were hardly there so tickets hung open for
weeks, making me and my team look bad. It didn't help that because tickets
contained seldom useful information, we were asking customers to repeat
themselves when we finally did get them on the line.
I found calling customers back with empty promises as pointless as running
around an ocean liner full of holes with duct tape, trying to patch up the
entire ship. It made more sense to me to kill all the birds with one stone and
solve the problems where at least half of them originated, the back end.
I wanted to join the systems administration department to have the authority to
make the kinds of corrections on the back-end that would solve a lot of our
woes. I also wanted to join because I stopped learning technology and started
learning politics. I wanted to join because I knew I was going to be there
until the two existing members of the systems administration group strolled in
at 10 and 11am. I wanted to be there because what I wanted to do something
about the problems I saw, immediately. I believed in proactive resolution of
potential problems because reactionary fire fighting is not how to delight the
customer.
That was our new CEO's motto: delight the customer. However, we had standards
and practices in place that, basically, didn't do that. A quality assurance
department in the rest of the business world is the group of individuals who
beta test a product or service to help R&D work the kinks out before marketing
rolls it out. Instead, QA was our company fire department. Instead of using
funds for R&D on streamlining and automating processes, we spent money on
hiring people for the QA department, whose job was to listen to customers
lambaste us and then get someone in provisioning, technical support or my
department to drop whatever we were doing and help that customer. Instead of a
fair, first come-first serve system, our policy was whoever screamed the loudest
got to cut in line.
The President and CEO of the company were on the same page as me: if customers
are getting escalated to QA or themselves, something is seriously wrong. What I
couldn't seem to get any action on was the issue that NOT integrating webhosting
into the same process DSL service went through was the cause of all this. Not
my team not returning enough phone calls fast enough. There would be no phone
calls to return if customers didn't have to wait upwards of three weeks before a
domain name was ready to use. The new internal customer database supported
everything but our duties in the webhosting department so orders were still on
paper. At the Hosting Services Department's peak head count, we were doing over
400 orders a week by hand with no automation WHILE juggling trouble tickets.
However, as I said, we were not like most dot-coms, and when I said for better
or for worse, this is where I say for better.
Many internet companies got the wake-up call of a lifetime when while doing 90
on the so-called information superhighway, they suddenly saw their tachometer
pegged at about 6000 RPM and a bell shaped object in the road behind them in the
rear view mirror. They found out that there's no way in the world shares for
their information-based, data-oriented organization could be worth more than an
energy company. Remember when Yahoo! and Network Solutions were at between
$100-$150 a share while Chevron was at a little over $53? They also found out
that smoke and mirrors can only work up to a point. We weren't the only ones
promising the world and not coming through. We weren't the only one with faulty
internal processes that made delighting the customer an unattainable goal. When
the hot air was let out of NASDAQ, it was only a matter of time before it was
our turn. So, after I quit, 19% of InternetConnect's staff was ejected into
outer space on January 4, 2001, a grim year for a lot of us. More got flushed
later that year.
However, inside sources and a brief visit to resolve my own billing matter with
them revealed something wonderful the summer of that hellacious year. They
got humble. They also stayed alive. They were the few survivors during the
dot-bomb blast and that's no accident. Despite the chaos in my world, in the
universe of webhosting and dialup and then IP block assignment, the company was
going on strong. Millions in venture capital, the largest footprint of any DSL
company with 60 cities at its peak. The strength in that organization was a
few different things. Market position, a great product nobody else had and the
most charming team of ambitious employees I've ever worked with in my six years
in this industry. By the end of that summer, InternetConnect finally became
the company it was supposed to be. They had about a hundred employees who were
actually happy, their technology pristine, and customers were actually being
satisfied.
And then came Covad and the rest was history.
I salute the men and women of InternetConnect in all their future endeavors. I
still feel lucky to have worked there. Soon after we broke the DSL line of
products and services, there were dozens of players on the field but we knew we
were the leaders. We knew we were the winners. I still think their founder was
the best man for the job. Despite what anyone might've thought, as a customer
or as an employee, when you do something that no one else has ever done before;
when you try to build a nation-wide network from the ground up using a tiny team
of wacky sidekicks, the journey ahead will be turbulent. But to see it through
the way their president did took vision. How any man could see the company the
way it was when we left Wilshire Boulevard and not jump ship is amazing, but if
he had've done that, it wouldn't had become the 350 person powerhouse it was
when I left. He really did something great back there and I can appreciate it.
Not just anybody could do that. | |
| | | Why Isn't Adelphia Business Solutions On List? Why isn't Adelphia Business Solutions on the CLEC death list? They are in Chapter 11, have had three layoffs within the past year, stock is at one cent, have several lawsuits filed against it and isn't making any money. Perhaps the moderator can elaborate on why Adelphia Business Solutions has not been placed on the "CLEC Death List". | |
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