IDT Priorities....?

[Keith Willis]

My brother (another frustrated IDT customer) told me a few days ago that
he had been hearing a lot of radio ads for IDT's long distance phone
service. He is of the opinion that IDT is losing interest in being an
ISP and will eventually shift its corporate focus solely to telephone
service.

Of course, it's all speculative at this point, but it might explain why
IDT has let its service decline so much in the past few months. If they
have no interest in their ISP operations, why make any attempt to rectify
the problems?

I have to wonder why it takes 3 minutes to download a 12-line text
newsgroup message, or why it's impossible to get past "93 bytes read
(stalled)" when attempting to download binaries. All I really want is
the kind of service that IDT provided up until July of this year. But
it's been three and a half months since then, and the service simply
continues to decline.

And -- looking a few years down the road -- what happens to IDT's phone
customers if/when the company decides phone service is no longer a
priority, and they'd prefer to move on to some other endeavor? My
experience with their news server is more than enough to convince me NOT
to even consider using any other service they might offer in the future.

KW

[Jerry Slaff]

IDT was a telephone company long before it was an ISP.

Jerry

--
================================
Jerry Slaff jsl...@idt.net
Rockville, MD, USA

[Jack L. Cory]

amen

[Adam M. Charney]

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:49:53 -0800 "Jack L. Cory" <jack...@idt.net>
wrote:

:Keith Willis wrote:
:>
:> My brother (another frustrated IDT customer) told me a few days ago that
:> he had been hearing a lot of radio ads for IDT's long distance phone
:> service. He is of the opinion that IDT is losing interest in being an
:> ISP and will eventually shift its corporate focus solely to telephone
:> service.

You don't need to be a genius to figure that out. IDT last year had
revenues in excess of $300Million, with ISP services contributing
about 7% of that total.

IDT historically was a long distance reseller/reorigination vendor.
They began providing internet services as a benefit to their phone
customers; presumably once they had the infrastructure in place, they
decided to sell retail internet access accounts.

Clearly, IDT's primary interest is in the low-overhead long distance
business, with large chunks of revenue from bulk sales to large users
rather than the relatives high maintenance retail ISP services and
frankly I don't blame them.

It certainly wouldn't suprise me if in the near future IDT were to
sell their ISP service business.