Mr Matt
join:2008-01-29
Eustis, FL
kudos:1 Reviews:
 ·CenturyLink
 ·Comcast
·Embarq Now Centu..
 ·Millenicom
| If the Internet were a municipal private water system!  You would only be allowed to take a shower once a week. You flow rate would be reduced or you would be charged $1.99 per 100 Gallons if you used more than your allotment. You might not be able to take a shower during peak periods because the water pressure would be to low.
Here is why lack of competition has screwed the customer. As a former Dial-Up ISP insider I sat in on many meetings where upper management cursed what they called the Mickey Mouse ISP's. The reason they were so pissed off was that the Mickey Mouse ISP's thwarted managements efforts to raise prices by implementing usage based billing like American On Line had and raise monthly prices. In 1995 dial-up internet access cost about $24.00 per month for a 14.4Kbps connection. By the year 2000 when my employer sold their customer base to a national ISP the competition forced the company, to reduce monthly fees for flat rate internet access, to about $14.00.
There were two major reasons why my employer abandoned the dial up business. The first was the cost of constant equipment upgrades to keep up with the competition. When competitors advertised that they upgraded their network from 14.4Kbps to 28.8Kbps customers began to move their accounts to the ISP that offered the higher speed. Management got tired of the high cost of upgrading their POPS every Six Months. The straw that broke the Camels Back was when the competition began offering performance enhancing software. The big problem was both the cost to upgrade pops with "Turbo" Software and the cost of holding the customers hand to install the software. That caused them to throw in the towel. The second reason was the hand writing on the wall. Management projected that within Five Years (From the year 2000) dedicated broadband would replace the dial up and their embedded base of dial up customers would become worthless. So they sold their customer base while it still had value. |
