Splitpair
Premium
join:2000-07-29
Cow Towne
 ·T-Mobile US
| reply to Dogfather
Re: Going the way of AOL
said by Dogfather  :But no company in their position, no matter how good, can survive the death of line sharing. I disagree. As an ILEC technician who works almost exclusively with CLEC’s I can tell you there are some strong and doing well CLEC’s out there despite line sharing and many other changes from the political winds of Washington. The good ones the successful ones find market niches and moves the ILEC’s by their sheer size and lack of maneuverability cannot properly serve.
As for EL IMO they grew so fast they totally lost control over spending. Instead of concentrating on stemming losses from dial-up by encouraging an internal shift from dial-up to DSL they let those subscribers slip away to ILEC’s and CLEC’s. As for Muni WIFI there’s a ton of money out there and I don’t see much of it jumping on the Muni WIFI bandwagon so my guess the long term profits are not in that arena. Why EL with their limited resources thought they could re-invent the wheel and move the industry is beyond me. In the end driven by investor demands they tried to be too many things to too many people and ended up failing to serve their customer base which they admit they will continue to under-serve until they whittle down the customer support drivers to what they consider an acceptable level. They also in an attempt to raise subscriber counts bought way too many “wholesale” subscribers from marketing firms with too little oversight of how the accounts where generated. These are now bleeding from the churn as those accounts cancel before term many times with no recourse for EL. Going forward they have clearly stated in the 4q report never again.
What’s the future of EL? I think EL will stabilize the subscriber base to the point they can just about pull the plug on tech support then if with the economy going south they can pull off a couple of quarters breaking even they will be in a good position to sell off the base pay the debts and at the end of the day jump off with maybe silver parachutes where they will slide laterally into a similar slot probably in the same industry.
Wayne
--
Yeah, there's a storm on the loose, sirens in my head
Wrapped up in silence, all circuits are dead
Cannot decode - my whole life spins into a frenzy
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