DoRight
join:2007-07-20
Mechanicsburg, PA
 ·Comcast
 ·Sprint Mobile Broa..
 ·Verizon FIOS
1 edit | I say 1st Qtr 2009
I give Earthlink less then a year... I would think a small company would have better success with FTTH then a larger company anyway. Less overhead and quicker to deploy. I am not impressed with VZC FTTH yet. In the last year they have raised their rates on internet, voice and TV atleast 2 to 3 times.. You can't tell me they had 23 Billion sitting around to deploy FIOS nationwide. They have also gotten rid of some discounts that they had when you signed up. I wouldn't expect anything impressive on pricing for another 5 years.. |
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David
No,there is another.
Premium,VIP
join:2002-05-30
Granite City, IL
clubs: | They might be better off buying small telecom companies (like mom and pop shops) and go that route. Won't make them money overnight but probably wouldn't make them broke either. |
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DoRight
join:2007-07-20
Mechanicsburg, PA | You mean like IVC? Illinois Valley Cellular.. lol |
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David
No,there is another.
Premium,VIP
join:2002-05-30
Granite City, IL
clubs: | no, like the one down by o'fallon, IL (HTC telecomm) and Egyptian phone company. |
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NetAdmin
CCNA
join:2008-05-22
| reply to David
Like these guys: »www.eatel.com/
Just as a point of fact, the linked provider has had FTTH for a couple of years now and is a tiny fraction of a fraction of the size of ATT and the other big boys. Those guys are proof that FTTH is not too expensive to be done.
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Over ten plus years of carrying The Clue Bat... |
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Mr Matt
join:2008-01-29
Eustis, FL
·Comcast
 ·Embarq
|  Earthlink was pushed by the Incumbent LEC's
 Around 1999 Earthlink began a program to acquire regional Dial-Up ISP's. In my opinion the company hoped to migrate their Dial-Up customers to Earthlink DSL. The Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers directly and indirectly made it impossible for Earthlink to reach their objectives. It appears that the ILEC's predatory pricing practices both as competitors and sellers of DSL transmission services to Earthlink made future profitability difficult if not impossible. By charging Earthlink high prices to deliver their signal, while offering DSL Services to Earthlink's Dial-Up customers at lower prices, the ILEC's placed Earthlink in an impossible position. Earthlink found many of their Dial-Up customers converting to Telco DSL rather as they had hoped for, Earthlink DSL. The moral of the story is that one cannot create a successful business model when one of your suppliers is undercutting your pricing and selling to your potential customers directly. I believe that it is unfair to fault Earthlink when their problems resulted from the ILEC's predatory pricing practices. This problem could have been eliminated if Earthlink required ILEC's to sign a non-competitive clause in their contract prohibiting the ILEC from selling DSL services directly to end users. The ILEC would not have been prohibited from selling DSL transmission services to other ISP's. |
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fatmanskinny
Premium
join:2004-01-04
Wandering
 ·Comcast Digital Vo..
·Comcast
| Add in bad internal management. I worked for them and believe me, they were and may continue to be so middle management heavy, it is insane. Throw in there an executive team that did not know how to capitalize on emerging technology.
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The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary. |
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Richard B
Fur It Up
join:2007-06-22
Portland, OR
·Comcast
1 edit | reply to Mr Matt
I have to disagree; I was a loyal EarthLink dial up customer. I was originally a Teleport ISP customer in Portland Oregon and left because I knew the local mom and pop ISP could never upgrade the networks for increased customer base. I suffer frequent bottlenecks, busy signals, and dropouts. So when it was time to upgrade to DSL Earthlik was my first choice but the provisioning would take a moth or more. Further more all I was buying was EarthLink logo on a Verizon network. I did not make sense.
EarthLink mistake was not to reinvent itself. They would have done great as a web and service hosting company-offering e-mail, security, domain name and web-hosting solutions compare to the pitiful retail service for telecoms and cable. Instead tried to take the Pan-AM / Branif route hope for government regulation a la Brand X case and Muni WiFi thinking pigging out at the government trough will save them.
Rot in Hell Earthlike your liquidation is richly deserved. |
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shdesigns
Powered By Infinite Improbabilty Drive
Premium
join:2000-12-01
Stone Mountain, GA
·Atlantic Nexus
1 edit | Mindspring
I had Mindspring, a great local ISP with good tech support and a consistent, reliable connection.
Then EarthStink took over. Tech support became a joke, my modem dies and they send me a crippled buggy one (even more crippled than the Zyxel I had.) Their redback gateways became more and more unreliable.
I had spent hours with their tech support. They were clueless 20-question zombies with an hour wait to talk to them. The mIndspring techs knew their stuff and even showed my how to uncripple their modem.
Mindspring had nice web pages that showed current and planned network issues (you had free dialup as a backup.) Eventually all that went away.
EL offered to upgrade my 1500/256 to 3000/128 at the same rate. No thanks, I need the upload to send files to my server. They refused to offer a lower rate; $50 for 1.5meg was just insane.
Now have an even better ISP. I how get 3500/384 for less than EL with tech support that is immediate.
EarthStink can go down for all I care. They just seem to want to suck money out of you rather than provide service. I heard a tech say the new management is clueless.
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Scott Henion
Embedded Systems Consultant, shenion on #ATU @irc.freenode.net
SHDesigns home |
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Rory Conaway
| Earthlink WiFi move
Actually, their WiFi move was a good one. Their costs were out of line with their revenue however. Technically, they also gave the wrong expectations of their performance in terms of ubiquitous coverage. However, I do believe it was their future. If I'm Earthlink, I step back, redesign the systems from the ground up and go back at the WiFi model. Let's say that instead of 40 AP's per square mile, they did far fewer but had a higher bandwdith. Then instead of using some indoor unit that cost $60 or more, they used another methodology that guaranteed a specific level of performance. I wish I had their budget. I would have deployed 6 cities for what they paid to deploy in Philadelphia, including Philadelphia. It was their future and they have now probably blown it. |
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KrK
Heavy Artillery For The Little Guy
Premium
join:2000-01-17
Tulsa, OK | Helio was kinda cool
I've got a friend who has that "Transformer" phone. He loves it, he can use internet, phone, texting all unlimited etc on any network etc.
He's not going to be happy.... |
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benc
Premium
join:2007-06-17
Glen Carbon, IL
·Charter Pipeline
·Future Nine Corpor..
·Callcentric
·AT&T Midwest
| No Wonder Helio Was A Money Pit
If it weren't for this website, I never would've heard of them.
Where do they market? How do they market? Who is their intended market?
I've never seen a TV ad, or a flyer in the mail. I haven't even seen any Internet ads for them.
It's no wonder they lost money. How are they supposed to make money when people don't even know it's available?
I would never sign up for it, but this world is big enough that no matter what it is, someone somewhere will buy it. |
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benc
Premium
join:2007-06-17
Glen Carbon, IL
·Charter Pipeline
·Future Nine Corpor..
·Callcentric
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to KrK
Re: Helio was kinda cool
said by KrK  :I've got a friend who has that "Transformer" phone. He loves it, he can use internet, phone, texting all unlimited etc on any network etc. He's not going to be happy.... Can your friend simply sign up for one of those unlimited plans with one of the major carriers? |
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KrK
Heavy Artillery For The Little Guy
Premium
join:2000-01-17
Tulsa, OK | His phone works great here.... or when he's deployed in Afghanistan. According to him, he has no problem getting signal when most people have none on their phones. |
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hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Cleveland, OH | reply to Richard B
Re: Earthlink was pushed by the Incumbent LEC's
Why should earthlink rot in hell? You never stated they did anything wrong to you? Got a lot of grip over a company for no reason-damn! |
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hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Cleveland, OH | reply to Rory Conaway
Re: Earthlink WiFi move
Earthlink used an outdoor carrier class brand named Troops. The product itself has issues. Everyone who uses it has problems they don't do as they claim. They should have used Sky Pilot instead. |
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Rory Conaway
@cox.net
| Actually both products are good for their prospective markets. All products also have their quirks. SkyPilot may not have as much throughput as a Tropos but works better over longer ranges. We have had some great designs with SkyPilot that have gotten some national industry success.
As for Tropos, I like the radios and installation but I'm not a fan of the entire network being layer 3. However, that didn't stop them from having many successful installations and an integrated mobility solution. We have a few Tropos radios up and they seem to work very well. In addition, I saw a Tropos radio hit a laptop behind a brick building at 1200'. That's pretty impressive radio performance. We have had successful deployments of both products at Triad Wireless. In fact, we just brought up small Tropos network in Arizona.
Belair has the highest raw throughput. Scottsdale has that. However, a firmware bug means we have to physically go on every pole and pull the power off the radio to reset the firmware. That has never happened with Tropos or SkyPilot.
All three products are good. In summary, you just need to pick the product that works in your application. |
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sivran
Long Live The Suite
Premium
join:2003-09-15
Arlington, TX
clubs: | reply to benc
Re: No Wonder Helio Was A Money Pit
I saw plenty of ads for them.
I thought they were annoying. |
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benc
Premium
join:2007-06-17
Glen Carbon, IL
·Charter Pipeline
·Future Nine Corpor..
·Callcentric
·AT&T Midwest
| said by sivran :I saw plenty of ads for them. I thought they were annoying. Where?
If on TV, what channels?
If on the Internet, what websites?
Have you ever received a flyer in the mail? If so, what demographics describes most of your neighbors?
As for annoying ads, I haven't seen a Helio ad but I've seen other mobile phone operator or MVNO ads that I thought were extremely annoying.
Once, quite my accident, I saw an ad for Boost, an MVNO that sells prepaid service. It was a hip-hop/"gangster" themed ad. Very bad choice, I'm telling you.
Now there's no way I'd want to buy that service now. |
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jc100
join:2002-04-10
| reply to DoRight
Re: I say 1st Qtr 2009
With those sort of investments, a year would be generous. However, a company can do a 180 if they get the right management. Obviously, it's time Earthlink's shareholders (think it's a publicly traded company?), replace the leadership. Seeing that those in power don't know a thing about internet, this company is doomed. Until they get a board and a CEO with some experience and brains, this is a losing battle. One could have guessed BPL would have failed, Helio was a loss, etc. That wasn't rocket science. Anyone who knew anything about internet and computers could have foreseen these failures. |
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