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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4443)	7/5/1999 1:20:00 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Ferchrissake Frank, Don't bring thozz zealots over here, please, I beg you..... Once a BBS, always a BBS. That's my motto! Zen? Zen? I had more in mind a Soutern Baptist Revivalist Meeting. Full E-murshun, as they say....

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4443)	7/5/1999 7:24:00 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

80% of the carriers' revenue is generated by business users. 20% remaining is generated by home users. 80% of the operational costs is incurred to support the provision of telephony services for the residential users and the 20% remaining to support business users. The so-called mew world -to use the term Cisco's CEO coined- will look like this: WorldCom's deputy chairman: “our religious focus on the business customer” has been to deliver the most lucrative market for the smallest investment. The company has already wired up 52 city centres in the United States; once it covers 85, it will have access to three-quarters of America's business telecommunications network. Continuing in this course of action, companies -at least the larger ones- will use extensions of their enterprise networks to provide the telephone and data line for employees to access their intranets from home. We can infer that will be left quite a few possibilities for provision of pure telephony services under this assumption above. How is going to be provided the service for users in need of telephony-only service? HOw telephony as public service will be financed then?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4443)	7/5/1999 11:02:00 AM
From: SDR-SI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Good Morning Frank and all, To my naive and parochial little mind, an ISP is a provider of services that enable a flexible entrypoint onto the Internet and support its customers' generalized and customer-defined Internet and related communication needs. I think that AOL has proven itself to be the antithesis of such a concept. It seems to me that AOL is a provider of "on line services", but that its corporate philosophy is totally opposed to the "dumb network with control and determination at edges" concept. Their philosophy is quite reminiscent of the Bellhead approach in that it asserts that they (AOL) are the only ones that can determine what the customer needs and that they must make the customer's decisions for him and protect him from the dangerous (and no doubt useless) unrestricted and unfettered net access. They apparently feel that the customer (and I mean both individual and business) must have everything laid out before him with only a restricted, AOL-determined, narrowly-defined glimpse of the real network world. Their apparent view is that the Internet is just a small, hopefully minimal, sub-service requirement of their AOL-defined customer-available online environment. They clearly are a bbs service. They clearly are a large advertising billboard. They clearly are a self-promoting site of e-commerce, but other than in their own minds, it would seem hard that, from a "networker" viewpoint, they could be called a real ISP. To me, a real ISP provides basically unrestricted and generalized gateway access to the Internet. To me, a real ISP is one that accepts the inevitability of the migration of needs-definition and control to the edges. To me, real ISP's will continue to move further toward their being enablers of the network and being offerers of services, rather than being restricters or determinants of services. To me, real ISP's will continue to blend into the network interiors and become "utility-like" (in the good sense of the word) in the universality of their offered services. To me, real ISP's will be looking at ways to enhance and measure their incomes through parameters related to data flow and the value of the data flow itself, rather than from being an active participant in or the principal of each transaction. Every one of these things is something that IMHO is antithetical to the *AOL-is-the-center-of-the-universe* and *AOL-knows-what's-best-for-you* philosophy and culture. What really worries me is that AOL is doing things like buying Netscape, the prior embodiment of customer network access enablement. It's hard to believe that the Netscape-like philosophies will survive the marriage (or, to probably be more correct, the adoption). I may have an unduly prejudiced viewpoint on AOL's AOL-centered, restrictive philosophy. I know that it's hard for me to note an AOL address on a business or on an an individual that one has come to respect, and not saying to myself "Why are they on AOL?". Apologies to all AOL'ers, but I said at the outset that I was naive and parochial. Have a great holiday, Steve The

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4443)	7/5/1999 12:47:00 PM
From: lazarre	Respond to of 12823

frank, I don't understand how anyone thinks that AOL is NOT an ISP. That it is and much more but the definition has yet to be invented; besides, you'd have to be a great marksman to pin down that moving target. **OT***** Have you at all looked at ISLD which had its debut last week? Not a bona fide " last mile " topic but if you ever get the time to look at it please feel free to comment on the ISLD thread. L

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (4443)	7/6/1999 4:22:00 AM
From: Darren DeNunzio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

The AOL Lesson: How to Get Ahead by Mistreating Customers I really like this guy!.... Jesse Berst, Editorial Director ZDNet AnchorDesk How's this for a success formula? Give the worst service in the business. Mislead customers so flagrantly that you're sued by 44 states. Repeat for five years. Believe it or not, this is how America Online became the world's most powerful, most important Internet portal. Consider, for a moment, what AOL did wrong: Abysmal customer service. According to the most recent Inverse rankings of ISPs, AOL is worst in reliability. AOL routinely finishes dead last in surveys of this type. Misleading advertising. AOL has been sued three times in less than three years over billing problems and access glitches. Deceptive privacy practices. More than once, AOL has been caught making unethical use of its members' names, only to back down in the face of customer outrage. Click for full story. According to business textbooks, these crimes should have sunk the company long ago. Instead, AOL has become the dominant online service. So let's look at what it did right -- so right it cancelled out the company's mistreatment of customers. Focus on ease of startup. Others concentrated on ease of use. Or quality of content. AOL focused on making it easy, easy, easy to get started. That's because the company always knew it was going to... Aim at mainstream consumers. AOL targeted people who wouldn't know any better. People who would be afraid and confused to switch once they finally got online. And then it delivered simple, everyday services those consumers could use and understand. Taken together, these first two moves let it... Rely on customer lock-in. Mainstream consumers will put up with almost anything -- poor reliability, bad service, higher prices -- rather than go through the pain of starting over again. In the early years, whenever Steve Case had the choice between improving customer service or sending out more signup disks, he chose the disks. Case understood the overwhelming importance of market share. And America Online is the first true power in the Internet era. Because it realized that it is much better to have lots of unhappy customers than a few happy ones.