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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 customers caught in the crossfire.
Here’s the typical story. Customer signs up for 7Mbps DSL services from ISP. Six months later the customer receives a letter from Qwest saying something-to-the-effect of “we accidently allocated too much bandwidth to your area”. The customer is given the option to either cut back their internet access to a much slower 1.5Mbps connection or sign up for Qwest’s shiny new ADSL2+ service with more bandwidth than they are getting now. Hmmm, gee. Tough decision.
I just happened to stumble upon a technical explanation for some of Qwest’s gerrymandering. Apparently their ADSL2+ technology is causing some crosstalk issues with legacy DSL customers. I’m sure Qwest’s marketing department sees this as a terribly unfortunate situation.
The traditional local ISPs are dying and the quality service they offered is dying along with them.
Every day a new vendor or service provider touts their new cloud computing technology and strategy. But what is cloud computing? It is quickly becoming one of those catch phrases which hosting marketing groups morph into every product pitch.
The origins of cloud computing stem from grid computing. You generally find grid computing in academic institutions and research laboratories. You’ve probably read articles about schools that build supercomputers using hundreds of off-the-shelf desktop machines. They use grid computing architectures and technologies to tie all those computers together. Think Borg. You can’t install Windows XP on this sort of massive cluster. These types of systems only support custom applications that are designed to take advantage of the distributed computing architecture.
Cloud computing incorporates the horizontal scalability of grid computing and packages it into a service that is delivered from a datacenter. The idea is that you can install your applications in a datacenter computing environment with little regard to the underlying infrastructure. Your applications live in the cloud. Cloud computing environments generally utilize virtual servers, networked storage, and significant software automation. Amazon’s EC2 is a good example of a modern cloud computing strategy. Their hosting service allows users to load applications on virtual servers and then scale those virtual servers — even across datacenters — to meet increased performance requirements. Google’s App Engine is another example of a cloud computing strategy. Do users really know where their applications live within Google’s infrastructure? No. And it doesn’t really matter. Google’s massively distributed infrastructure ensures that applications survive and thrive within the cloud.
The biggest challenge with cloud computing is that the specialized architecture requires specialized application development. It requires re-engineering time that most businesses don’t want to invest in. Many of Amazon’s bigger EC2 customers are companies that have strategically focused their application development on Amazon’s platform.
I believe that cloud computing will one day replace common hosting services such as shared websites, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers. But it will take a few more years before we see a standardized platform that both hosting providers and businesses can support.
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.
