Broadband Broadens Its Pitch (cont’d)
By Mike
Musgrove
But don't
pick up that phone yet -- there's more. If broadband providers
can't close the deal with consumers on the strength of an
attractive price alone, an increasingly popular strategy is to
fold Internet access into a package with other communications
services. Starpower Communications Corp., for example, gives
customers a discount of a few dollars a month if they order an
all-in-one bundle of the company's cable TV, broadband and phone
services.
Verizon now
offers a package it calls Verizon Veriations, in which customers
sign up for local, long-distance and wireless phone service as
well as DSL Internet. Verizon DSL will run you $49.95 per month
by itself, but get the broadband service as part of Verizon's
bundle and it's $34.95.
Broadband
companies like this type of deal because a consumer who has
signed up for multiple services makes them more money -- and is
more likely to stick around. For those consumers, meanwhile, it
means one or two fewer bills a month.
Before they place all or most of their telecom existence in the
hands of one company, however, customers also need to be able to
count on that firm sticking around. Many broadband Internet
providers have not: Those optimistic and patient early adopters
have had to put up with a lot of volatility in the business over
the past few years. Several high-profile bankruptcies -- Excite
At Home Corp. on the cable side and NorthPoint Communications
Inc. and Rhythms Net Connections Inc. in the DSL market -- have
left customers stranded, sometimes without any broadband option
at all.
Charles E.
Hoffman, president and chief executive at Covad, observed:
"We've gotten quite good at migrating customers from broadband
ISPs that failed. We've done quite a lot of that over the last
few years."
