Mr Matt
join:2008-01-29
Eustis, FL
 ·Comcast
 ·Embarq Now Century..
|  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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hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Cleveland, OH | 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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hrobins
Premium
join:2000-10-15
Regina, SK
clubs: | reply to fatmanskinny
I agree with fatmanskinny! I worked for them in tech support and can tell you a ton of horror stories. |
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Richard B
Fur It Up
join:2007-06-22
Portland, OR | reply to hottboiinnc
Because of eh brand x case. Instead of trying to win new customers in the free market thy tried to live of government regulations and court decisions. |
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hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Cleveland, OH | LOL WTFE! Not a reason for hating them as much. If it wasnt for most of the ISPs that were run out of business by the Telco's DSL would never be where it is at. |
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