"…You want to give AOL free ride on your wires. It is elementary how this returns far more than it loses. Can you tell me why? (Hint: Does T expect to make the big money by maintaining the wires?)"
Well, this sounds like a challenge.
Let assume that out of the $40/mo that ATHM/ATT changes for the service, $12 goes to ATHM for infrastructure (starting with the routers located at the cable head end), content, and e-mail services. Now comes along a ISP who wants to migrate there customers to cable access for the same $40. ATHM gets the same $12/mo, but instead of providing e-mail and content, the money goes to the @Work division to supply high-speed links between ATHM's internal network and the ISP's. T gives up some of it's $28/mo to the ISP, but recovers part of the lost revenue by providing the high speed lines to the ISP along with some up front funds for infrastructure cost, or even a small equity in T itself. In the long run, T could sell additional high-speed links between E-commerce sites and ATHM's internal high speed network (running on all those ATT high speed lines) as on-line purchases/subscriber and multi-media advertising is added to the "number of eye-balls" metric.
OK, now I'm way out of my league! Go ahead, rip me a big one!
Ted
|
