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One strategy that telecommunications companies have adopted is bundling, or selling a combination of services at a reduced price. The goal is customer lock-in, a situation in which the buyer is more or less trapped in their purchase. In many cases, lock-in happens when the customer satisfices or compromises to gain value or convenience. Customers might grow dissatisfied over time, but they are unlikely to leave because alternative services are not available, or their perceived switching costs are too high.

A variety of US cable television and telecommunication companies have offered bundling programs. The usual items include television service and broadband Internet.

Companies that offer cable modems usually offer these services through the same “pipe” or connection – the coaxial cable drop found in many homes.

Local exchange carriers (LECs) offer POTS (traditional or “plain old telephone service”), and the final connection to the home is the familiar RJ-11 modular phone jack found in most US homes. Some LECs also offer mobile phone plans in their bundles.

Landline connections may be offered through VoIP or POTS, depending upon the carrier’s technology.

Agonizing over savings

Alina Tugend of the New York Times provided a great example of this decision-making process in her article last week. Customers sometimes obsess over lock-in when their friends brag about how much they saved by switching. Yes, lock-in also works well for insurance companies, too!

In Honolulu, Oceanic Time Warner, Clearwire and Hawaiian Telcom each offer bundles. Oceanic has a standard cable television package that includes cable modem service, long distance calling and VoIP calling plans. Oceanic staff can connect the customer’s RJ-11 telephone jacks to the company’s network, so customers can continue to use their existing landline handsets and equipment.

Clearwire offers broadband Internet service, long distance calling and VoIP telephone numbers through its WiMax network. Customers can hook their landline phone into Clearwire’s modem. The Clearwire service does not require an installation visit, but the coverage areas are somewhat limited. This article at DailyWireless.org has several interesting diagrams of business telephone systems.

Hawaiian Telcom keeps struggling

The HawTel package includes a POTS landline, long distance calling and DSL. HawTel is still working on its IPTV offering, which has been delayed by implementation problems. IPTV would let HawTel offer television service through the same RJ-11 telephone drop used by its landline and DSL offerings.

As a side note, I hated HawTel’s obnoxious “Savers Unite” advertising campaign, and am glad that it has been replaced. Was the tagline a call to action or an insult? It was hard for me to tell. The radio and television ads reinforced a stereotype of the “thrifty local” who clips coupons, hoards travel-size toiletries and wears old clothes to pay the “price of paradise”. Then again, telecom marketing campaigns usually strive for the “common touch”, in an effort to hold the average customer.

Telecom bundles are subject to a host of Federal, state and local regulations. Pricing is often controlled by government agencies and franchise agreements. On 18 August 2007, I discussed HawTel’s naked DSL option, which let consumers order DSL service without a voice landline. HawTel was late to act, as thousands of subscribers adopted mobile phones and dropped their landlines. These customers switched to Oceanic, Clearwire, or other broadband Internet services.

Customer lock-in is difficult to achieve when companies fail to implement their industries’ key success factors well. On 16 November 2006, I discussed HawTel’s billing problems after the company was purchased from Verizon. Mike Ruley never overcame these earlier issues and lost his post as HawTel’s CEO earlier this month, as I mentioned on 5 February 2008.

From LA Weekly: the Los Angeles Unified School District attempted to roll all of its employees to a single payroll calendar. The conversion has been a disaster, as LAUSD managers failed to follow a basic tenet of information systems migration – parallel conversion. Keep running the old system running until the new system works!

It was January when the district’s new, $95 million payroll system started spewing out erroneous checks, underpaying some people, overpaying others, and creating such chaos that administrators now pay special counselors to deal with the psychological trauma.

The blunders persist despite $37.5 million in fix-it cash, and teachers are ratcheting up the pressure by boycotting faculty meetings and holding rallies. They marched on September 25 outside the LAUSD offices — “We won’t take it no more!” hundreds chanted…

Wikipedia’s article on parallel adoption is actually helpful, with a decent reference list of supporting articles. This concept is discussed in the IS 6100 textbook in chapter 12 on page 476. Both terms have similar meanings.

At the end of the day, employees expect an accurate paycheck

Parallel testing is all but required when a company moves large amounts of data processing to a new system. Developers rarely anticipate every possible exception that might affect a new information system.

Snopes reports that a new mass-mailing worm tells users that they have visited “illegal websites”. This reminded me that it’s time for my regular end-of-term anti-virus spiel.The winter holidays are that special time of year when hard drives “crash” and no one has a recent backup of that final paper or project. Faculty are as guilty of this sin as students, to be honest.

If you are working on a final project and need a quick, free way of backing up the files, open a free Gmail account and mail the files to yourself. if you lose the file on your local computer, you can retrieve the copies you sent to your Gmail account. Gmail provides users with 2.5 GB of disk space, and accepts 10 MB attachments that would choke other mail servers.

I don’t understand why HPU students continue to use Pipeline mail, when it’s so easy to open the Pipeline Mail options and auto-forward every message to their Gmail account.

If you need a good, free anti-virus program for your Windows computer, try Avast. This is what I have used on my home computer for most of 2005, and I like it. Do the free registration and your copy of Avast will automatically update itself with new virus signatures.

Another free anti-virus product is available at FreeAV. I sued to recommend this package, but its update system is a bit clunkier than the Avast implementation .

I’ve been using the beta version of Windows OneCare on my TabletPC since October. This will be a subscription service that offers an anti-virus solution, software firewall that works in both directions, and a data backup utility.

So far, my only complaint is that the program tends to start very slowly when it finds no available network connection at system startup. Occasionally the software firewall gets overzealous and doesn’t notify me that it has blocked a program. But the configuration is relatively easy to change.

The beta appears to be a good free solution. OneCare does its automatic virus and firewall updates quickly, which is a boon. Every two weeks, OneCare prompts me to connect my external hard drive for an automatic data backup. The backup feature also works with optical drives. However, it won’t completely restore your computer from bare metal. If you need that feature, try Norton Ghost.

OneCare is a blatantly obvious attempt at creating a subscription-based revenue stream for SOHO Windows users. For someone who owns one or two computers at home, OneCare should be an easy value-add decision 30 days after a new computer purchase.

If there’s a decent academic discount for a OneCare account with multiple computers, it would be a worthwhile deal. Frankly, I wish Microsoft would make OneCare totally free for university faculty and students when the program goes live next year.

I’ve used my own home backup and firewall systems for years, but that’s a tale for another day.

Hawai’i: It hasn’t been a great week for students at UH-Manoa. Parking is a nightmare as usual. The university’s implementation of its Banner registration software had some gaps, including a feature that would have allowed UH administrators to see how manys tudents were on the wait-list for each class. As a result of this and an unexpected surge in enrollment, several hundred UH students have been unable to enrolll for the classes they need. Thirty new classes were added on Monday, but some classes have many more students than the recommended maximum. It reminds me of my college days, when students were lurking outside offices and classrooms, hoping that another student had dropped the course. This will cause problems with the teachers union.

At least the football season opens 11 days, although the Warriors may have trouble beating Florida Atlantic.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• University of Hawaii
• 2 August 2004: Frear Hall sits dormant on UH-Manoa campus
• 16 July 2004: UH-Manoa has no short-term fix for dorm crunch
• 15 July 2004: Oahu students get low priority for UH-Manoa housing

Tech: Pick-and-Drop: Sony is still working with pen tablets. “Pick-and-Drop is an extended concept of the commonly used drag-and-drop. With this technique, a user picks up an object on one computer display with a stylus, then drop it on a (possibly different) computer display. For example, a user can select or create a text on one’s own PDA and pick-and-drop it at the desired location on the whiteboard. From the implementation point of view, the data is transferred through the network, but from the user-interface point of view, this technique allows a user to pick up digital data as if it were a physical object. ”