Click! Network – Michael Pellegrini

Boss Hogg Lives!

Okay, here’s the scenario: somewhere in a town probably deep down in the rural South, the politicians decide unceremoniously to dump part of the city’s utility system. The line given to the townsfolk, is that the utility system is losing money. This issue of losses is hotly contested, but the town fathers are able to stall off an independent audit to determine if the utility is really losing money. The only daily newspaper in town is owned by basically the same group of people that run the town – they’re all good ol’ boys – so it spouts a nearly constant stream of propaganda backing up what the town fathers say. Feeling secure, the politicians plow right ahead. There are questions, however.

Why, you ask yourself, would anyone want to buy a utility that’s losing money? So they can take the losses themselves, instead of the city? Obviously, this is altruism’s finest hour! But then you remember that the person buying the utility is one of the group of good ol’ boys. Armed with this thought, you have to assume it’s a no-brainer the utility must be making money hand over fist! Otherwise no one would want to buy it. The good ol’ boys don’t waste money on unprofitable businesses. It’s just not done. And cooking the books to make it show a loss is so, so easy.

The move to sell the utility doesn’t really surprise anyone because the town’s politics are dominated by the good ol’ boys, and they often make decisions like this. This is not these politicians’ first rodeo.

Where might something like this happen? Right off the top, most people would think of Hazzard County, Georgia, with Commissioner Boss Hogg running the show. It’s a given that everything Boss Hogg does, profits himself or his friends. That’s Just the way he rolls. Everyone accepts this, because that’s just the way business is conducted in that small fictional southern towns. Or so TV would have us believe.

Continue reading “Hazzard County, Tacoma” →

The whole problem with Click! Network is that their management are idiots. They never have had any idea how to compete in selling broadband access.

Click’s always controlled the wholesale prices that the ISP’s use to set their prices. They kept the wholesale prices higher than they should have been because they were trying to milk the bandwidth for all they could – trying to wring out every little last penny. And they always followed Comcast’s pricing rather than trying something innovative – like offering discounted service for low income, handicapped and seniors. And they always lagged behind in speeds, making it hard for the ISP’s to be competitive, which has also affected revenues overall.

The issue of finances that has been hotly contested. Because there’s never been an independent audit of Click’s finances, we really don’t have any idea whether it’s making or losing money. But if management had learned their product, and taken the initiative and been more imaginative in their pricing and bandwidth offerings, it certainly would’ve helped.

Examples of Click management’s stupidity are manifold. One good example is when Comcast upgraded its network to DOCSIS 3.0, it took Click three years before they caught up. In the mean time, the Click ISP’s were stuck selling a vastly inferior product at higher prices. Do you suppose that ever affected revenues? Looking back right to the start, I can document probably a half a dozen examples of where this exact same scenario played out over and over and over. But Click management never learned from their mistakes.

The attitude of Click’s management has always been that once they offered some particular speed package – say 12 MB/s – then that’s all that people would ever want. That’s an updated version of AOL’s supreme arrogance, when their CEO famously said, “56K is all the people will ever need.” We all know what happened to AOL.

Click management never had a clue of what was coming down the pike in terms of bandwidth and applications. And so they were always way late to the party with upgrades. Time and again, they demonstrated a profound ignorance of the market they existed in.

Their cardinal sin: they did not know their product. Not at all.

Continue reading “Privatizing Click is not the answer” →