ISP's: Your reply pretty much covered all the bases Frank.
I'd expect clearer category demarcations will begin to form over the coming year, maybe two, and the labels attached to those that now fall under the all-encompassing heading of "ISP" will change. With the market being so revenue-centric (since they can't really focus on anything else because they're all negative), it seems likely that the category names will follow the dominant revenue categories, and move away from, for example, speed-related names, and more toward service related names. Internet access will be the lowest common denominator, so there's no reason to include that aspect of the business in the business description. When pure access was pretty much all they provided that made sense.
In other words as the non-access revenues begin to exceed the access revenues, what was formerly an ISP, or pure access provider, is by all rights something new now (because access revenues aren't a majority of total revenue). Some possible categories might be online sales/e-commerce, advertising, hosting, personal services...I'm sure there are several others. Each person will have a different online focus aside from just plain access.
The Free ISP's would be the extreme of this, since they get zero revenue from access fees. They will be the interesting ones to watch and will probably be the ones to get the new category names first.
We'll see!
dh |
