Hello Jon,
Your posts are interesting, however, I will disagree. I am Garry Betty the President and CEO of EarthLink.
One of the strategies that EarthLink has employed from the beginning was to be network agnostic, i.e. rent vs buy. We have successfully done that wholesaling IP services from UUNet and PSinet outside of Soutern California. We have also actively been looking at alternative technologies which provide our users with higher bandwidth, cost effective solutions to connect to the Internet.
The first tangible example was our deilivery of Internet service through Hughes with their Direct PC product. It is satellite download with a dial uplink. The second example is what EarthLink is doing with Charter Cable. We will be providing a cobranded Internet service to all of Charter Cable's customers in Southern California with either a hybrid solution or one using full duplex modems. We have been in a hybrid trial for over two months now and commercial sales will begin in the next two months. Our competition in this account was @Home. EarthLink will be able to provide the services you so laud in your note to over 200K customers in S.C. and should be just the beginning.
Another technology that EarthLink finds interesting is ADSL. Over the coming couple of years this could prove to be a connection methodology that is not only fast but provides service similar to what you have now with cable. Because we don't own our network in most cases, it doesn't matter to us which connection technology ultimately wins, only that EarthLink can provide the resulting services. Net ... I don't think of cable as a threat, rather it is a good opportunity for EarthLink to provide additonal dial services versus analog and ISDN which are available today.
As for your comment on a consumer focus versus business .... I'll point our several interesting statistics. First, over one half of all of EarthLink's 300K members are businesses or professionals who use our service in conjunction with their business. EarthLink members use three times as much email as the corresponding AOL customer, for example and use on average 50% more online time. We deliver over 5.5M e-mail messages and over 230K hrs of online service per week.
During calendar year 1996, 15% of our 32M in revenue was generated from high end services like ISDN, web hosting and frame relay. This number will increase to over 20% of our consolidated revenues in 1997. Additionally, well over one half of all of EarthLink's sales in this arena come from our existing dial up member base, i.e. our dial up business is a fertile source of incremental upsells for addtional services.
Hope this clarifies a couple of things for you. |
