When I started my business, broadband was not an option for anyone. I was lucky to permeate the market early. However, now we have competition. DSL and cable. So, I am wondering, how do you market wireless vs. other forms of broadband? Here’s what I got.
Wireless Pros: covers more area. Faster to set up an account. In some cases, faster than others in ping times, faster upload speeds.
DSL/cable Pros: generally cheaper, greater download speeds (up to 7Mbit for $42 in my area. DSL requires no contract.
We charge $40/month, including equipment rental. With comp like this, I am looking for more marketing advantages, especially on the expensive Motorola platform.
We all know that the big telecoms can operate at a loss to gain subscriber base practically indefinitely.
That is serious, If you upgrade to advantage you could offer more than 7meg down and greater upload speeds, go from 20ms to 3ms with the P-9 and advantage equip. Shop around for the best possible bandwidth so you can compete. Now, we do require a contract but I’m not in your possition. Who says you need a contract with every customer? I have found it doesn’t matter if you have a contract or not when it comes time to get paid it depends on the person. If push come to shove I would negate the contract if they had good credit.
Get at least a 10meg pipe. Offer up to 10meg down 1.5 to 2 meg up and Your good credit is your contract.
Just an idea, I’m sure others will add to it and by the end of the thread we will all have something to run with.
Simple, don’t compete with residential DSL and Cable Modems. The economics of scale for telcos and Cable companies are impossible to compete against and make a decent living.
Sell to businesses. This is so easy it’s scary. To a business, internet access is more than a convenience, it’s a necessity. To a business owner, having one phone number to call and one person who knows them and will roll a truck THAT DAY and/or do whatever is needed to get them up and running is PRICELESS. Provide personalized customer service and excellence in customer service. You can charge the local hourly rate for computer and network support and they will happily pay it as long as you are reponsive, fast, and do it right.
Compete against business DSL and T1/Fractional T1. Most businesses are not wired for cable so that’s not too much of a problem. Offer a 99.00 SOHO with local tech support and you will kick DSL’s @ss all day. Add on services such as web hosting, network/computer maintainence and you have the KILLER APP. Telcos can’t touch it. Offer a 4M/1M T1 buster for 199 or 249 (whatever you think you can get). You can oversubscribe a 5M pipe by ALOT. Sell the fact that you provide 24/7/365 monitoring and support. Contracts are expected but you can choose not to use contracts, OR you can use waiving the install fee (299) with a 1 or 2 year contract. Sell building wide access to Property Managers and offer revenue sharing, get creative. Move into Hospitality, food service, waiting rooms, etc. Enable your customer to offer free wifi with purchase, etc.
You will still pick up residential customers because DSL and Cable are not available everywhere, but if you focus your efforts on business customers you will have fewer customers paying more per month and loyalty that cannot be swayed by price alone. With less customers you can provide better service.
If Motorola would lower the price of their wireless service modules, they could easily compete with DSL and/or cable. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Lower prices would be Great!!
I agree when the buisness accounts are available to sell to, But when your in mostly residentual area? you have three choices compete, sell or go broke. I have found once you get a customer 95% of the time they will not switch if you treat them fair and have reliable service.
If you can get 4 or 5 hundred residentual accounts, or more you can still make a good living and continue to grow.
It may require more locations, better budget, the desire to survive.
We have DSL, Cable, Clearwire and three other wisp in our area and we continue to grow(knock on wood).
Right, but the one company NOT on board with that plan is Motorola. I mean seriously, that 5.7 dish isn’t a $130 (CDN) piece, maybe $5 each in lots of 1,000.
Jerry Richardson wrote: Simple, don't compete with residential DSL and Cable Modems. The economics of scale for telcos and Cable companies are impossible to compete against and make a decent living.
Sell to businesses. This is so easy it's scary. To a business, internet access is more than a convenience, it's a necessity. To a business owner, having one phone number to call and one person who knows them and will roll a truck THAT DAY and/or do whatever is needed to get them up and running is PRICELESS.
My thoughts exactly.
We have never tried to compete on price with the local competition (Telco DSL and cable). But we beat everyone hands down on service, support, and customer service. The reason is simple. We are a small local business and the other guys are huge impersonal corporations. One of the handfull of techs here has a personal relationship with each of the business clients we have.
Any business owner who has been through the hell of getting tech support for SBC (err, I mean AT&T) DSL will *drool* over the support we provide.
In my mind Motorola keeping the prices where they are is a good thing. It is a barrier to entry that keeps every yahoo out there from deploying it. The higher cost requires us to be better business people, have a better business model, and provide better service.
Moto does make the Canopy lite to lower costs if you need to. I realize that this is only 768k and it seems useless BUT, if your network is low latency, highly reliable, and your service is excellent you can compete with it.
If your customers are switching, look at your service offering. I don’t mean how much speed for how many dollars although that is part of it. I mean what else do you bring to the table that will benefit the customer. How responsive are you? 1000/364 service is fine if the service is stellar.
Little things go a looooong way. Put together a single sheet of paper that explains how to keep malware off the computer, how to detect when it’s there and Norton missed it, and how to remove it. Do another list of useful and fun software. We provide a sheet to the customer with their info on it. We also created a “How to Setup Outlook Express”…get it? These are things that don’t cost anything, bring value to your customer, and make you an indespensable vendor.
We don’t provide spam or virus filtering, provide 10M mailboxes, bandwidth shaping is done at the radios (which really really works well). Monitoring is 24/7/365 and if a radio goes down I know it. If it does not come back up in 10 minutes I call the customer (the phone number is attached to the alert). You have no idea how HUGE that is to the customer. Out network latency is very low, our reliability is very high, and we respond when a customer needs us. We have not had a customer switch on us yet.
This is why I like this forum, Several tested Idea’s that work have been laid out. You can’t find information like this in a book.
:lol:
This was great to read. And reaffirming in many ways. Yes, customer service! I guess I’ve always known this, and we have been doing it. Perhaps so long now that we have forgotton that’s our MAIN advantage. Thanks for the input. I would also add… we have boldly gone where no telco will ever go… with llamas even!!
Cable / DSL isn’t available everywhere you go. It’s also not mobile.
Canopy is useful in almost EVERY area, not to mention you can pretty much hook 2 SM’s to a poll on your truck and get service anywhere. 