I just learned this week that Qwest is planning to exclude local ISPs from its new broadband product roll out. Qwest is investing a couple hundred million dollars in rolling out FTTN ADSL2+ services in several markets — including Minneapolis, my company’s main market. In the past ISPs could be “connected” into Qwest’s DSL network so that residential and business DSL subscribers could use local ISPs for Internet access. Those customers would still pay Qwest for the actual DSL line. Now Qwest doesn’t want to share their infrastructure with little local ISPs anymore.
Thank you Qwest.
It’s time to put the local ISP business model to bed. It just isn’t relevant anymore. I’ve been working with ISPs since 1994 and I’ve seen many changes through the years. I’ve worked hard to convince my company and others in the industry that the days of the local ISP business are numbered. But change is hard to come by when the money train is still coming in. Well, that train is about to leave the station. Sometimes you change because you want to and sometimes because you have to.
The upside is that my company will ride out this wave with no problem. I think that it will take Qwest 18-24 months to roll out this product successfully. We will easily make up the lost revenue in our fast growing managed services business by that time. In fact, we should be able to focus more time and energy on our services that are growing. Many of the other local service providers that depend on Internet connectivity for 30-75% of their revenue will not make it. Motto: Change or die.
January 23, 2009 at 1:20 pm |
[...] ISPs fading away I wrote about Qwest’s new initiative to kill off local ISPs a number of months ago. I’m starting to hear more real world complaints from our DSL [...]