Tucows, who own two of the best Internet-infrastructure companies I know of (Hover, a domain registrar; and Ting, a mobile phone provider) have announced their own super-high-speed fiber-optic ISP in Charlottesville, Virginia, where it will compete with one of the worst infrastructure companies in the world: Comcast.
I know the Tucows people very well; they’re based in my old neighborhood in Toronto and the CEO, Elliot Noss, is a friend and comrade in fights over fair Internet policy. He’s been hinting that this was coming for a long time — it’s very exciting, especially as it’s being marketed under the Ting name. Ting is the first wireless phone company I’ve ever encountered that makes me happy to be its customer.
“Everyone who has built a well-run gigabit network has had demand exceeding their expectations,” Noss said. “We think there’s space in the market for businesses like us and smaller.”The Charlottesville service will operate under the Ting name, but the company’s wired networks will eschew with the pay-for-what-you-use pricing scheme, and will instead be set up like a traditional internet service provider—albeit with better customer service, Noss said.
“From the outside, it seems odd, but we do email for 2-3 million email boxes. When your emails aren’t working, people get angry. We’re used to being in a business where things absolutely have to work,” he said.
“When we got into mobile, we just took the same business processing and billing and applied them to mobile, which was suffering from incredibly high pricing and a low level of service,” he added. “We thought, where else can we take these things we’ve gotten good and apply them to?”
A Domain Name Company Is Starting a ‘Mini Google Fiber’ to Compete With Comcast [Jason Koebler/Motherboard]
(via /.)