They have dropped from 80p each to 14p since May and a futher 0.5p on Wednesday. It would be fun to see them drop more. Netservices, in my opinion, will not be in the market in another 12 months but Biscit may well still be as they still have their 6,000 customers.
Indeed, there does seem to be evidence that the walled garden is Netservices's swan song - or, rather, that they're getting EzeeDSL to sing their swan song for them. I don't doubt that Biscit is going to outlast Netservices.
However, I also suspect that EzeeDSL and 186k will outlast Netservices too. What will 186k do when Netservices gets cut off by BT? Will they keep the "EzeeDSL" brand name, or will they rebrand, so that they can still offer a new consumer broadband deal, which isn't associated in people's minds with the failure of EzeeDSL? Will this happen before or after May 2007, when BT will start charging ISP's for disconnections?
If it happens after May 2007, then I suspect that EzeeDSL will probably migrate their customers off Netservices onto another wholesale service themselves. But if it happens
before May 2007, I think that EzeeDSL will run into the same problems with Netservices that V21 and Biscit are having right now.
So EzeeDSL are taking a big gamble on this one, in my opinion. Then again, although we're led to believe that 186k is much more financially stable than Netservices, on the other hand they don't yet appear to have any strongly established consumer brands. Perhaps the top man Dominic Marrocco feels he's got enough money to sink it if it all goes pear-shaped, and he can take the risk. Or perhaps he's making very sure that the risk he's exposing himself and his company to is very strictly limited.
After all, when was the last time that damages were awarded against an ISP for going offline suddenly? He can just turn round and say it's all Netservices's fault, just like V21 and Biscit are doing now. But how will they deal with questions like "you should have known this was going to happen, so why didn't you do anything about it?" What will that do for their brand image?
Still, what do I know?