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.