Competing with DSL

[richinuk]

Hi guys,

I'm interested in what views you all have regarding competing with DSL products in the same area. My town has circa 200,000 people, with ADSL widely available (ADSL2+ coming soon). Also there's a nearby city with 1.5m population with similar ADSL availability. From experience, there's a fair spread of users getting between 512kbps up to 8mbps based on loop distance. Also, 5ghz spectrum is relatively clean.

Are you guys finding that similar wireless services at similar (or cheaper) prices are selling, or are you losing out to the DSL providers?

Rich

[lonnie]

In every market there will be people who choose one provider over the other for purely personal reasons, thus in a city of that size you will have a good customer base for those who do not wish to deal with the telco and cableco.

Then when you provide a good service and compete on price you'll have an even larger customer base to draw upon.

Also, don't forget the many acreages near the city that have no hope of getting ADSL or cable. Definitely there is a market and ADSL has created it for you. The Telco has created the need and cannot service the outlying areas but you can.

We have ADSL here and we charge a bit higher than they do and provide less bandwidth. In the ADSL served areas we are getting about 1/3 of the users available but in the outlying area we have 100% of the market.

[richinuk]

Thanks Lonnie - that's exactly the sort of feedback I was after. Luckily all the telco exchange locations and lots of other stats can be googled, so I've got some good ideas of where the under-served areas are.

[tog]

We are also doing a lot of residential in direct competition with local telco and cableco. Just as Lonnie said, we are a good choice for those who are sick of dealing with the telco and cableco. The cableco is not all that great at providing Internet and the telco's service is ok, but of course they have India answering the phones and they can't ever get a bill right, and even when they do it's always an irritating scam.

I have a single featureless residential phone line that is never used except to carry my DSL service at home. (I have a dual-WAN router, I primarily use my own wireless, but also have DSL attached to WAN2).
http://tog.net/bellsouth-bill.jpg

Anyway, you should concentrate some effort on providing service to MDUs (condos, apartments) and business complexes, strip-malls, places where you can bring one backhaul in and provide business-priced service to multiple business clients in the same strip-mall or office complex.

Condos with owners associations are the biggest challenge, they move very slowly if at all on anything, you have to start negotiations and keep trying for a couple years... but netting a $2k/mo account is nice.

[go.fast]

It's not all wine and roses, but if you work hard enough and keep customer satisfaction you can succesfully compete:

http://www.oregonfast.net/gofast/DuneCityPlug/

[tog]

Haha is that like a city government meeting?

[go.fast]

yeah, the next little town over.

[luka]

We do have cheaper and better internet packages than our local telco dsl, at least for now. As Lonnie said there are many people requesting internet as telco is building market now (not only for internet access but everything internet related too).
However, I am not sure how it is real to compete with dsl2 and further technologies coming. There are also other providers anouncing some triple-play things etc. For now TP and similar equipment and whole systems are costly but anyways small wisps should be prepared for that, and I hope VNC is preparing something for us, soon :)

[lonnie]

The last big delay was the WAR1 but now that it is real, we can start moving forward.

We'll be announcing new things over the Summer, and as always, I will not be releasing details until the time draws near.

[amp]

Yeah it is possible to get into any market if you put your mind to it. If there is a lot of noise you diversify into more short range connections and many pop's. Get around it under it whatever it takes. And with 5ghz its not too hard to provide 6+ mbit if you do it right.

We got a cable company that does TV and Cable internet service using a licensed 2ghz frequency then down coverts it to 800mhz and plugs into a cable modem. They run extreme output power making it so they can go through trees and even looks like they go through houses sometimes ;). Easy for them to hit 20 miles. Along with almost free setup and low montly. But then its over subscribed to death causing all those problems.

Mixed with DSL and Cable and 5ghz and other 2.4ghz none of them are that good. Big companies are about volume and some think they can monkey around with their equipment and deploy with no experience or testing.