Or lacks economies of scale. I was reading about Oracle buying NetSuite, and it mentioned that after Oracle bought PeopleSoft, they fired 5000 employees.
Profits = revenues – expenses We tend to assume that if we take care of the top line, the bottom line will take care of itself. I’m not arguing against that, just saying some of the big guys seem to find it easier to cut expenses. It doesn’t help that whenever someone “explains” the ISP business model, they simplify it to bandwidth costs a penny a gigabit, and everything else is profit. So people don’t think about things like batteries at tower sites. And it certainly is easier for big wired ISPs who can cherry pick their territories so they don’t have remote sites feeding 20 subscribers. It makes GPON sound attractive, put all the electronics in a nice building in town, and run passive fiber to the customers. In fairness, mobile carriers have remote cellsites which pretty much all have generators. The sin I’m most guilty of is putting battery backup at a site and then not implementing remote monitoring and alarming, so I don’t find out that I have to take out a portable generator until the site has been running on batteries for a day and they’ve run down. The other thing with batteries is you’ll go 3 years without a power outage and then finally you have one and you didn’t replace the batteries and they fail. So it’s necessary to regularly test the batteries or else replace them on a schedule. From: CBB - Jay Fuller Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2016 9:50 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine a smaller company certainly has a smaller budget.... ----- Original Message ----- From: Ken Hohhof To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2016 8:54 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine The secret is to not let it bother you, or create systems and hire people that just ignore customer complaints. At least that’s what some big ISPs with no competition do. (Frontier, Centurylink) I compare them to slum landlords who buy distressed properties and don’t spend a lot of money fixing them up or doing maintenance. If people don’t like it, evict them and somebody else will take their place. The churn costs less than fixing and upgrading the infrastructure, and ignoring the whining customers doesn’t cost anything if it’s part of your plan and you don’t lose sleep over it. If you’re really clever, you build government subsidies into your business plan. It’s like if you sell your WISP to a big company, you probably imagine they will implement all the upgrades you couldn’t afford or didn’t get around to. Probably not. Once you stop losing sleep over customers saying bad things about you on Facebook, you spend only enough to keep the churn down to a tolerable percentage, the point where the cost of acquiring replacement customers starts to exceed what it would cost to fix the network. Even with competition, inertia is a powerful force. Some people will whine but not leave. From: CBB - Jay Fuller Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2016 6:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine hahaha - that requires money! i have to pay for my mafia... ----- Original Message ----- From: Colin Stanners To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, July 30, 2016 6:11 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] whine whine whine whine That's the fun of running an Internet provider, which a lot of people consider an "essential utility" these days. All you can do is add redundancy through more towers and more UPS capacity. On Jul 30, 2016 5:30 PM, "CBB - Jay Fuller" <[email protected]> wrote: so i lost tower "b" yesterday during a storm. not a bad loss, actually. water in a cable shorted out a power supply. just happened to be the one backhaul link in. i got it fixed about 2 pm? this morning about 11 am another round of storms took out the main tower - tower "A " - power outage, i assume. haven't been down there yet. (ok, it's four hours later, its probably not just a power outage) now i'm getting calls from customers on "B" that they haven't had service in days. I guess not, if they didn't use it from 3 pm yesterday until 11 this morning.....uggh.... correction - i don't take calls on weekends. but they know me on facebook....
