How NOT to compete with Cogent
Recently, Nextlink has been advertising their new fixed wireless Internet service to tenants in my building. Nextlink, a division of XO Communications, provides high-speed Internet services to customers through a fixed antenna on the roof of their building which communicates with a central antenna (on the Sears Tower if you’re in Chicago.)
What I find funny about their marketing campaign in the flyers they’re distributing is that they’re trying to position themselves directly against Cogent by saying that a benefit of their wireless service is that you don’t have to deal with the “problems” of fiber Internet. Now I dislike that proverbial backhoe operator as much as every other network admin but I have a hard time relying on a 2.6 degree wide beam shooting through the air in a crowded downtown area any more than I do the skinny strand of glass running in to the building. I figured they were surely shooting for people looking for network continuity services instead of people using them as their primary ISP so I requested some pricing information figuring it would be pretty reasonable since they have significantly less infrastructure requirements than, say, Cogent would. I was surprised to find that their 10 MB service was almost exactly what we were paying for our 100 MB fiber service from Cogent and their 100 MB service was over 3x what we were paying and required at least a 2 year contract.
I don’t want to be a Cogent fanboy, they certainly have their problems, but if Nextlink wants to compete, here’s what I think they need to do:
1.) Lower your prices
2.) Don’t require 2 or 3 year contracts
3.) Leverage your ability to provide backup bandwidth to current Cogent (or any other fiber or copper-based ISP customers.) By this I mean offer a service that’s significantly lower in price than your primary data service option that has a bandwidth cap on it. By doing this you’ll provide us Cogent customers multi-carrier access (for when Cogent decides to initiate their next peering spat) and physical redundancy for when the backhoe strikes.
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