Earthlink Wants Dial-Up Customers Only
Earthlink is going back to basics. The company has tried several failed ventures involving broadband and now has decided to start gathering dial-up customers. It seems that Earthlink has a plan to buy customers from other ISP’s who don’t want dial-up since it is not as lucrative as broadband. But will this work?
According to this article, here is what Earthlink plans:
Plagued by an eroding customer base, EarthLink has managed to stay afloat — and even turn a profit in the first quarter after losing $135 million in 2007 — by slashing its work force in half and abandoning two failed ventures. Now, it’s crunch time. CEO Rolla Huff is banking the company’s future on the very thing that has caused trouble in the first place: dial-up.
Hello?
Huff has been saying for months he is serious. He has argued that he can’t stop losing customers to broadband but what he can do is buy dial-up subscribers from other companies that don’t want them and build a critical mass.
It’s unclear whether that strategy will work.
“The old core Internet service provider business that was central to EarthLink and AOL is really fading away and drying up,” said Lydia Leong, an analyst for Gartner, an information technology research company in Stamford, Conn. “They are a company with declining fare and declining brand equity.”
Interesting. While the world switches to broadband, Earthlink wants to go backwards and use dial-up customers to try and stop its decline. What next. American Airlines bringing back the steam locomotive? 
What do you think? Is Earthlink on the right track? Or are they dreaming the dream?
Comments welcome.
3 Comments
jcidiot
July 29th, 2008
at 9:34am
it’s a solid idea, actually. for many companies focusing on broadband, they could dump their burdomsome dialup users on earthlink…maybe even pay money for elink to take em. elink has more developed support focused onto dialup users, and can gain new customers willing to use dialup. the broband cos saves costs, elink has its customers, the users get better pricing and reliability with custttomer service. i for one survived to 06 on dialup, and it truly suffices for most basic web activities.
this tactic will last only so long however…. the next gen of web users will demand faster speeds.
ish
July 29th, 2008
at 1:14pm
I agree with jcidiot – it actually is a fairly solid idea. There are still many places throughout this country where broadband is not available. Then, there are the people who don’t need or want broadband. And, finally, there are those who simply can’t afford it.
Dial-up is still a major way to connect to the Internet. It shouldn’t be, but it is. I always look at Europe, and their low-priced, high quality, and high-speed connections and think “Where did we go wrong?”
But, as I said, there are still many dial-up users in the U.S., and someone needs to take care of them. If Earthlink can take a majority of them, they may actually do fairly well. At least, until we catch up to Europe in terms of broadband availability.
Just my two cents.
/// Ish
Jerry Tobias
July 29th, 2008
at 2:18pm
I was a longtime user of Earthlink back when it was Mindspring and it offered excellent tech. support and dialup service. Unfortunately, this didn’t continue. Switching to out-of-country tech support,autheticated email sending and receiving (which didn’t work in Firefox and Opera), and constant disconnects caused me to pull the plug on Earthlink.
What a shame, because it started out as such a great company.