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Monday January 5, 2004 The evolution of the ISP market as a model for public Wi-Fi In our last piece, we discussed how the development of the U.S./global cellular industry has some lessons in store for predicting the future of public Wi-Fi. Today we will draw some significant parallels between the development of the Internet service providers (ISP) market in the 1990s and today's public Wi-Fi market. Although the commonly held belief is that Internet usage exploded overnight, in 1993, almost three years after the advent of the World Wide Web, there were only 90 ISPs in the U.S. Enthusiasm for the Internet, however, picked up between 1993 and 1996, and there were estimates of 15% monthly increases in new Internet accounts. The amount of publicity and the low barriers to entry drove the market, and the number of ISPs operating out of their basements and garages mushroomed to more than 2500. Many of these providers had transformed a hobby into a business and most had less than 1000 customers. ISPs could enter the market with as little as $12,000 investment. Initially ISPs differentiated themselves based on the quality of the connection and number of telephone lines and especially the absence of busy signals. Pricing was around $15 to $25 flat monthly fee although AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve, which were known as online service providers rather than ISPs, charged per hour fees. AOL crashed for 18 hours in the summer of 1996, and its service deteriorated further when it introduced all-you-can-use access for $19.95, but its customer base grew from 900,000 in mid-1994 to 8 million by the end of 1996. Similar to the current Wi-Fi situation, security was a major concern for enterprise customers in allowing access to their corporate databases and a deterrent to the rapid growth of the Internet. However IETF protocols regarding security and interoperability as well as further improvements to VPN security especially IPsec increased the general trust in IP-based networking.
Source: Courtesy of eTinium, Inc. author Goli Ameri Visit our News Archive: Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec
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