AGL ate our baby

Dingo Blue, every dial-up user’s favourite ISP, is being shut down by parent company Australian Gas Light after costing AGL an estimated $45 million dollars in just twelve months.

Dingo Blue, every dial-up user's favourite ISP, is being shut down by parent company Australian Gas Light after costing AGL an estimated $45 million dollars in just twelve months.

According to this report, Dingo Blue has until June 30th to cease all operations. If no buyer is found before this date, all Sydney staff will be made redundant.

Dingo Blue was long the stalwart of the Australian dial-up gaming community, mainly due to its policy of no time limits on connections. However, this policy was changed on July 15th last year to a maximum 12 hour session time, after which customers were disconnected. This change, combined with a new policy of 400 hours per month and a 1.5GB data cap, created a major shift in allegiances. Suddenly, Dingo Blue was 'just another ISP' and customers had no reason to remain loyal.

Attempting to shift a group of dial-up users accustomed to leeching data 24 hours a day for weeks at a time, to a plan that effectively allowed them to remain connected for only half of the month in order to leech a paltry 1.5GB of data, was always going to be a hard prospect. However, Dingo Blue had to do something about users who were pulling down 12GB per month and constantly tying up modems while paying a paltry $25 for the privilege.

Unfortunately for AGL, Australian Net users usually respond with a rather large 'WTF!?!' when the 'unlimited' plans they sign up to are unfairly capped mid-contract, and Dingo Blue's case was no exception. From 80,000 customers in June last year, the ISPs customer base rapidly declined to its current level of 68,000 users.

The lesson here is simple. Don't offer 'unlimited' plans, or plans that give the impression of being unlimited, unless your company can afford to pay for the top few percent of users who will generate the majority of your bandwidth costs. Sceptics may point to Telstra as an example of a company that managed to pull what many feel was a straight bait-and-switch with its broadband service. However, Telstra's situation is relatively unique – unlike Dingo Blue, Telstra doesn't have to deal with 50,000 other companies offering what is essentially the exact same service.

Dingo Blue's demise, while unfortunate, was perhaps inevitable. Combine a hardcore customer base of Net users accustomed to leeching as much data as physically possible from virtually 24/7 connections, with a poorly thought-out plan to cut costs by placing limits on a service long marketed to those same users as unlimited, and you end up with – well, nothing.

When Dingo Blue eventually closes, its users will move on to other ISPs and telephone companies. The dream that was 'all you can eat' dial-up access has effectively died and twelve months from now, Dingo Blue's own website will still have lamented our loss best – Dingo who?

--Brad Webb