Have you tried patching all the holes that they can get in?

You know they had Jerry Remy on until he couldn't do it anymore right? Ever hear about his kid and how involved Remy made sure he stayed with the team even though there were repeated issues before the tragedy happened? Ever look up what happened to Eckersleys kid just recently in the woods and the involvement or lack thereof he had with her? NESN don't care if the ratings are there.

No one on felger and mazz is associated with the show you referenced as far as I know. It's not even the same station.

Yea, Fios is only available in a few buildings. A decent part of it is that TV franchises are done on a town-by-town basis in Massachusetts and Verizon only wanted to build Fios where they could also sell TV - and then Verizon found out that their fiber business had poor economics even with TV service and backed out of a ton of their fiber builds in New York and New Jersey.

I think a lot of wired providers found the economics to just be poor when challenging an incumbent. RCN went bankrupt in 2004, 10 years after being founded. It hasn't really expanded its coverage in recent memory and is now just owned by a private equity firm via a leveraged buyout.

On the plus side, it looks like maybe the economics are shifting. AT&T has announced that they're going to be doubling their fiber footprint over the next couple years. Verizon isn't doing anything nearly that ambitious, but they are looking to grow their Fios network by 9% over the next 3 years. AT&T seems to have a difference of opinion on the economics of fixed-wireless vs fiber compared to Verizon. AT&T has said that fixed wireless isn't going to be a big part of their strategy and that the cost to serve customers with fiber is better, but some of that depends on how much data you're expecting customers to use. Verizon seems to disagree and is planning for their fixed-wireless network to cover 2.8x more households than Fios (with a very minimal investment in Fios expansion).

It's hard to compete against an incumbent and invest in a new network where you might only take 30% share. I know, everyone thinks that the whole world would jump on fiber just because they would, but it's hard to take marketshare and with something like Fios, you'd often need a landlord to approve having it installed. RCN has been in Somerville for many decades and can easily hook up most residences without the landlord being involved because they'll use the same coax that an existing cable connection would use (and they can just disconnect the unused Comcast line outside the building). With Fios, you're talking about installing an ONT (optical network terminal that converts the fiber to something usable inside your home) in the basement and then running ethernet from there or trying to use existing coax wiring with MoCA - but a lot of buildings in Cambridge don't even have coax running inside the building because they just made penetrations from the outside on each floor - back in the day for cable TV and back when these buildings weren't worth much during the white-flight era of cities.

In Somerville, RCN has about 27% of the market while Comcast has 73%. Yes, RCN isn't fiber so it isn't really a superior product, but people truly hate Comcast and RCN can only achieve 27% - and RCN has the advantage that they can easily disconnect Comcast on the outside and swap their connection in while Verizon would have a lot more work to do.

That's not to say it can't or shouldn't happen. AT&T is making a huge bet on fiber over the next couple years and they even talked about moving into markets beyond their wireline footprint in select areas where it made economics sense past that. That said, it is hard to compete with incumbents.

Seafood World

Lobster Land

[deleted]

a lot of these ISPs were looking to surge their user bases and then sell out to the major providers. When you don't get bought out, you run out of capital to grow so aggressively. If they can maintain their customer base and revenue, then there is lot room for keeping the business.

Yea, they aren't going out of business yet, but they did lay off half their workforce in 2022. When you're in the business of building networks, you need people.

I'm guessing they'll come back and maybe keep the lights on for their customer base, but they probably won't be expanding much in the near future.

I don’t know, but I’d expect significant speed restrictions on all the roller coasters…

I agree we need internet options. I doubt Starry is going to come out of this healthy. Starry eliminated half its workforce in 2022. At that point, you're the walking dead - especially in a capital intensive industry. You need to be spending money building a network that can sign up customers and that simply isn't going to happen when you've laid off half your workforce.

Already, T-Mobile's fixed wireless business is 26x larger and Verizon's is 9x larger than Starry. In the coming years, it will be relatively straightforward for the big wireless companies to adopt Starry's strategy to augment their more traditional network. T-Mobile or Verizon could cover a large area with mid-band spectrum and then use millimeter-wave spectrum with installed antennas on large buildings offering improved speed and capacity for those buildings. Verizon has installed some street-level mmWave and could also use that to augment capacity in areas that need it.

I'm sad about Starry, but I think the future of fixed wireless is going to involve a much more layered approach that can impact more people and that will require low and mid-band spectrum in addition to mmWave. Low and mid-band spectrum allows a company to cover a reasonably broad area and start signing up customers and if the need arises they can augment capacity using mmWave.

I think there's a lot of competition coming to home broadband over the next few years, but I don't think it'll be from Starry. T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M customers by year-end 2025 (less than 3 years away) and that might not sound like a lot, but it would surpass Verizon's Fios which only has 6.7M customers. Even though it would be smaller than Comcast, it would be putting a lot of pressure on incumbent cable companies. Verizon is looking to have fixed wireless available to 50M households by year-end 2025 and while they're projecting fewer customers than T-Mobile, it's easy to see how availability to around 40% of American households would have a huge impact on the market.

Broadband monopolies have been acting in anti-consumer ways because they know you don't have another option. Even if you don't personally want T-Mobile or Verizon fixed-wireless, it can still put a lot of pressure on an incumbent monopoly to treat you better.

Sure, but it's still completely uninformative. And the email address - is that you? Is it just you? Comes across as an amateur operation without some of the basics.

Yes you omit the race

It also doesn't help that the government gave those massive internet cartels free money

I'd argue that the tech side "sucking" was what made the business side suck. Yes, if you were a customer, the tech side was great.

Starry's tech was based around millimeter-wave radios which basically require line-of-sight to function. That makes the tech expensive since you have to go to each building individually. The "badness" of the tech would limit Starry's reach to select larger buildings. That badness makes it hard to do marketing. How can you market your home internet service when 99% of the people you're advertising to can't get it? You're throwing your marketing dollars away. But if you don't advertise it, the people who can get it might not know about it.

If Starry's tech were better, more people could have been eligible giving them economies of scale, critical mass to make a strong marketing campaign worthwhile, etc.

If the tech were more effective/better, then the business side wouldn't have sucked. The tech might have been good for you if you were able to get it. However, if the tech was "bad" which prevented economies of scale and they had to sell the service to you for less than it cost them to install/run, then it wasn't really good tech. It was just subsidized tech until their money ran out.

I don't want to sound too harsh on Starry. It's just really hard to use millimeter-wave radios in a way that works for consumers. A business might pay hundreds of dollars a month for a wireless backup for their internet and be willing to eat installation costs, but a consumer doesn't want to spend that much.

I mean, Starlink is offering an alternative to Comcast, but I don't think a lot of people would want to pay $700 for a Dishy + $110/mo to get away from Comcast. Starlink is operating off a model where they're going after customers with no real internet option. Yes, you loved Starry and hated Comcast - but you loved Starry because they were willing to give you service at an unsustainably low price. You would have hated Starry if they kept raising your bill like Comcast. You probably wouldn't have signed up for Starry in the first place if their plans started at $100/mo.

I'm not saying that they would need to do crappy things to create a viable business model, but the tech severely limited the business. And, frankly, a lot of the things you hate about Comcast kinda work. You get people with an introductory offer of $30/mo for a couple years. In Boston, a lot of people move out within that timeframe anyway. Even if it becomes $60 in the third year, you're averaging $40/mo over the 3 year period, $45 over a 4 year period. Even if it becomes $80 in the 5th year, you're still averaging $52/mo over a 5 year period. Yea, it feels painful to be paying $80/mo, but you're not actually losing much compared to Starry's standard $50 rate. If you negotiate it back down (or cancel and get a roommate to get a new-customer deal), you can save money - albeit while starting to despise Comcast.

Starry's downfall is really that their tech wasn't good enough. Yes, it was great if you got it, but it wasn't good enough because they couldn't get it to a lot of people in a cost effective way. Using millimeter-wave spectrum has the advantage that you can buy the spectrum for cheap (compared to sub-6GHz spectrum), but comes with the disadvantage that you need to do a ton more work putting up antennas on individual buildings and then serving a small number of people per antenna. Starry was a bit of a moonshot kind of business - could one make mmWave spectrum viable for home internet. Turns out the tech wasn't good enough.

And I don't want to sound too harsh on Starry. Verizon poured so much time and money into mmWave and barely made a dent. They launched 3.5GHz mid-band 5G and made amazing progress fast. Verizon also bought into mmWave big time and it really didn't work out for them - and they had a ton of advantages over Starry, including legal advantages being the Title II Common Carrier in a bunch of the country which gives them cheap access at fixed prices to a lot of infrastructure, already having a huge fiber network, having a wireless network already, and having many $10+ billion to spend every year on their network. And Verizon failed at mmWave. Sure, it does have a tiny bit of coverage and it's cool when you get it, but the tech just didn't have the impact they'd hoped. Starry: cool if you can get it, but the tech just didn't support the kind of broad availability necessary to be viable.

spell check LAND

I mean, it's obviously a long-shot and has been for awhile. I even kept my previous modem just in case because I thought something like this would happen. Just saying it sucks 🤷🏻‍♀️

Judging by how crowded Lego Place always has been (and I’m sure will be when it reopens) I think a Legoland would make a killing here.

DunkinLand

Plymouth Plantation Land

Already have Six Flags New England

Canobie Lake Park?

Seriously I couldn’t work from home without it. During 2020-2022 my company’s office was closed. I started 2020 off working from home with Comcast spaying for 500 Mbs down and only ever getting 7Mbs upload. I couldn’t turn my camera on for video conferencing or else I’d lag like crazy. I could share my screen either. I switched to Starry, saved like $20 a month, have 200 Mbs down and 100 Mbs up. Starry has made working from home possible and more enjoyable. I need them to survive lol

No More Rats In My Basement Land

Rent Control Land

Starry has been going downhill for a while (from a business perspective, not your perspective as a customer) and it's hard to see them really recovering.

At this point, it'd be better to hope for home internet from T-Mobile or Verizon 5G.

The problem with Starry is that their wireless signals are extremely high frequency which means that they will be easily disrupted by things like walls, trees, etc. So they install antennas on the top of your building and point it at one of their antennas that they have a good line of sight for. However, this is very limiting and decently expensive.

T-Mobile and Verizon both have substantial low and mid-band spectrum holdings (and more high frequency spectrum holdings than Starry). Unlike Starry, T-Mobile and Verizon's signals can travel from antennas without needing line of sight.

T-Mobile already has 2.6M home internet customers and Verizon (wireless) has 0.9M. Starry has 0.1M. So Verizon's wireless home internet business is 9x larger than Starry's and Verizon has been at this game for less than 2 years. T-Mobile's is 26x larger and they've been at it for around 3 years. Starry has been at it for 7 years without a ton to show for it.

Really, they were going into a capital-intensive industry trying to compete on price with better capitalized incumbents. It's not a great strategy. Starry wasn't going around offering an order of magnitude improvement in service. Their selling point was "we all hate the cable company and we'll offer you stable pricing on a similar product." I'm not arguing that isn't a laudable goal. It is a laudable goal. It's just really hard to do.

T-Mobile and Verizon, on the other hand, both have way more money, way more staff, and a huge investment in infrastructure that they can leverage. "We already have these towers we're upgrading for 5G and we're going to have extra capacity in many areas with those upgrades. We could provide home internet in many of those locations and get extra revenue without extra cost. In other locations, we could put some more money into the network, make our mobile business better, and then sell some home internet." That's a reasonably decent business model leveraging existing strengths that can be extended. For Starry, having to approach all these buildings to get them to either lease space or give them space for free is a very time-intensive business (and staff time is money). Every antenna T-Mobile or Verizon put up can serve thousands of mobile users and cover more home users than Starry. Starry was really working with two hands tied behind its back.

I think in the coming years, T-Mobile and Verizon will continue to improve their home internet product and that will likely include high-gain installed antennas to boost performance, but even today they're making a lot more people happy than Starry was ever able to. Again, I don't mean that as a dig against Starry so much as a realistic view of what one could accomplish given the difference in assets between Starry and T-Mobile or Verizon. Starry doesn't have a truck-full of sub-6GHz spectrum that will offer a decent balance of capacity and coverage. Starry has a bunch of spectrum at 24GHz and 37GHz, but that's a lot harder to work with.