[11038] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
ANS is Number ONE in Internet Access Sales According to Internet Business Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gordon Cook)
Fri Mar 18 16:33:28 1994
From: cook@path.net (Gordon Cook)
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 1994 17:09:01 GMT
To: com-priv@psi.com
Cc: cook@pandora.sf.ca.us
I have been looking at the March issue of the Internet Business Report which
strikes me as improved over the February one. Unfortunately there is a very
misleading table on page 4:
there it says the four major access providers are
Company Employees 1993 sales (est)
ANS 125 $12 million
PSI > 100 $11 million
UUNET 70 $9 million
NetCom 50 $6 million
__________________________________________
Sprint doesn't even make the chart.
BUT what is much worse is that ANS is listed as the industry sales leader with
no mention that 90% or more of its revenue comes from the national science
foundation!! Of that 12 million - depending or not wether MERIT's take is
included - you get either about 97% or 75% coming from big daddy warbucks at the
NSF. (Via Merit of course).
Take this single US Gov't customer away and ANS is very likely far under Sprints
figures. Sprint certainly makes this claim.
Now in the text we do read: "ANS . . . that is one of the largest access
providers has a different sort of cushion: it administers the National Science
Foundations Backbone Network and thus operates largely on government funding."
Anyone think that when ANS comes calling with its brand new sales staff on
corporate customers we won't see them flaunting this IBR chart!? *WITHOUT* this
sentence from the text?
Why didn't IBR stop to think about the lumping money paid for running a gov't
funded back bone into money gained by sales to corporate customers? It is
talking about ACCESS providers after all. Call individual accounts apples.
Call a 12 million dollar a year backbone oranges. Call a chart ranking apple
sellers that shows a company as the leading apple seller when its sales were 75
to 97% oranges is misleading to say the least. Moreover the sentence from the
text certainly implies that the IBR knew that ANS was where it was based on a
"largely" different revenue stream that the 3 other prviders on the chart.
Unfortunately from the chart you'd never be the wiser. The difference between
this reporting and that of Tertzelli and Stewart in the March 7th Fortune is
awesome.
