[8300] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Net Access/Service Providers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Edward Vielmetti)
Fri Nov 12 23:35:13 1993
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 93 23:34 EST
From: emv@garnet.msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
To: com-priv@uu.psi.com
: The bottom line is, where does the competitive advantage lie in being an
: access provider? The only value-added I can see is doing a good job of
: supporting TCP/IP for the non-network-saavy. Phone lines are phone lines and
: eventually they'll become commodities like most hardware. The secret must be
: in the service/content side. If that's the case, AOL (and whoever's providing
: them with their lines) has a pretty good shot at being a big winner.
Let's see. You can have competetive advantages because of your
dense networking connections within a particular industry, so that
other organizations in that industry naturally seek you out when
they are looking for a network connection. There are economies to
be had from dense connections in a single geographical location.
Organizations that know how to get the (sometimes uncooperative) local
phone companies to deliver good service at reasonable prices will have
an edge, and there's also the prospect of getting alternative data services
(via video dial tone, alternative voice dial tone, wireless, cable,
or something even more creative).
>From a service point of view, the Internet is not the Internet wherever
you go. There are sizable data resources that are shared but that have
"ownership" of some sort, and having preferred access to same will yield
advantages. Any number of good internet applications software packages
have appeared in the last 2-3 yr, and you'd expect that in the next
number of years we'll see other tools dislodge things like "gopher"
where there are niches big enough to fit them.
Service providers with better software, or better understanding on how
to integrate off the shelf software, will be ahead of the game.
A substantial part of the networking overhead is billing, accounting,
and fulfillment; organizations that have these down pat will be ahead.
And of course there's *content* - special news wires and data feeds,
interesting people on line locally, better tech support, what have you.
In general, there are lots of places where any given customer could
be won away from any of the "big" online services (AOL, Genie, Compuserve,
Delphi, Prodigy). If you believe that there is plenty of room in the
picture for dozens or hundreds of companies each servicing some small
number of thousands of subscribers, then a big monolithic setup like
AOL is going to have a hard time over the course of time keeping up.
Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI 48103 +1 313 998 4562 (fax: 998 4563)
