NetBlazr Trying to Disrupt Enterprise Broadband Business

Brough Turner's "NetBlazr" service in Boston illustrates one potential way change can come in a market. As Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen notes, market disruption often occurs when new providers introduce services that are significantly lower in price, but also significantly lower in functionality, than the market-leading services they seek to disrupt. About netBlazr

In other words, the upstarts provide products that are good enough to solve a real problem, if not "good enough" to directly displace the leading services. NetBlazr suggests that its customers use netBlazr as a supplementary service to a primary broadband connection, as no single provider can guarantee 100-percent reliability.

Over time, though, functionality increases to the point that the upstarts are able to directly challenge the market leaders. Those of you with long memories will remember that this is precisely what MCI did when it challenged AT&T in enterprise voice services. It is Skype and other VoIP services, and is what netBlazr is attempting as well.


The company offers free symmetrical 3 Mbps service, symmetrical 50 Mbps service for $60 a month on a shared basis, or dedicates service at a range of speeds from 2 Mbps to 10 Mbps for prices ranging from $50 a month up to $200 a month.

The basic idea is bandwidth at prices roughly an order of magnitude lower than commercial services available in Boston. That's a classic "disruptor" strategy.

Why Do People Text Each Other?

In many markets, the cost of doing so is far less than the cost of making a voice call, says LirneAsia. And it is the relative cost of SMS compared to a minute of voice, for example, which drives texting, more than the absolute cost of sending an SMS (See Brough Turner's blog).

"What matters really is the relative cost of sending an SMS; for instance, in the Philippines, for a Smart TnT prepaid mobile user, a one minute call is about 5.5 times more expensive. In Pakistan, for a Jazz Budget prepaid mobile user, the ratio is about 2.1. In India, where SMS use at the BOP was seen to be the lowest (among the countries studied), the ratio was 1 – i.e, a one minute call and an SMS are the same price (so why would you bother SMSing if that were the case?)."