Good Morning Dr J:
I am heartened to hear of satisfied user's in San Gabriel, this is after all why we are in business. I agree with your above comment, that relative profitability to a great extent dictates what valuation is ultimately provided to a company and companies like Oracle, Microsoft, and Cisco are afforded very high PS ratios.
I disagree, however, that their is no "value add" in our business. In the most recent addition of "Smart Money Magazine" they rate different ISP's and EarthLink came in second out of ten behind only AT&T WorldNet and had the review not been at a time when our Technical Support staff was getting bombarded with AOL converts (the review was completed in the Jan-Feb timeframe), we would have edged out AT&T. For example, they site wait times in technical support of up to thirty minutes, today our wait times on a twenty four hour basis is less than 6 minutes on average and has been for the past three weeks. We were actually rated higher than AT&T is most categories.
Many things go into what makes a good ISP. For instance; what local access coverage is available in North America, how much bandwidth does the ISP have to the Internet, are peering relationships in place, how reliable are the underlying connection, mail and new services, jsut to name a few. As the "Money Magazine" article points out there are significant differences between different suppliers.
From the outset, EarthLink has not been satisfied with providing our members a high speed, reliable Internet "pipe" combined with basic service of mail and news. Instead, we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that EarthLink members are successfull in using the Internet to get value from our service. Examples of how this manifests itself would be the EarthLink home page which for over two years has provided our members not just with an electronic brochure about EarthLink but links to sites of potential interest and by using just a mouse, new users can navigate to potential sites of interest without having a great deal of knowledge about the net. More recently, we have provided our user's with a Personal Start page which creates a convenient way for a user to organize their Internet activities in a convenient way.
Additionally, we send our members a bi-monthly newsletter, bLink, which focuses almost exclusively on education. We send to most user's a book called "Getting the Most Out of EarthLink" and more recently we have written a guide called "EarthLink: A Guide of AOL Graduates". These efforts are entirely to help educate our members on the wonder of online activities and to enhance what we refer to as the "Internet User Experience".
We don't always achieve this objective, because if we did, I don't think anyone would leave our service. But all of us at EarthLink are striving for that and try to extend that attitude in all that we do. Not all is created in this world and that same axiom is true for ISP's.
cgb |
