OmniSky

» see omnisky.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2000 the internet at my house came down the telephone line and the meter ran the entire time it was connected. OmniSky was selling Americans an unmetered wireless connection for a device that was not even a telephone. Both of those things were true in the same year, which is most of what needs saying about how unevenly this stuff arrived.

OmniSky was founded on 7 may 1999 as a joint venture between 3Com, which owned Palm at the time, and Aether Systems. The product was a modem called the Minstrel that clipped onto the bottom of a Palm V like a second half of the case, plus the software and the service behind it. You paid $39.95 a month and the data was unlimited.

Underneath it was CDPD, the packet service that lived in the idle channels of the American analog cellular network. That gave OmniSky 19.2 kilobits per second at the absolute best and coverage that stopped at the border. The company built none of that. It rented the gaps in somebody else's network and sold whatever it could fit through them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the sled ~

The Minstrel was not a beautiful object. It roughly doubled the thickness of a Palm V and carried its own battery, because a radio drawing power from a handheld's cell would have emptied it by lunchtime. What it bought you was a device that was whole on its own. No cable and no phone sitting in the middle of the transaction.

The software is the part the acquirer actually wanted. OmniSky wrote a mail client and a browser tuned to a slow link and a screen a hundred and sixty pixels wide, and an EarthLink executive said afterward that the client software and the interface were the primary reason for the deal. In may 2000 the company picked Google as its search engine, which at that point was a deal with a startup rather than an obvious move.

~ the money ~

The numbers are hard to look at. OmniSky generated no revenue at all in 1999 and about $2.1 million across its entire life, against losses of more than $40 million before it had even gone public. It went public anyway, on NASDAQ on 21 september 2000, six months after the market for that kind of story had closed.

By november 2001 it could not complete its financial statements because a bankruptcy filing was pending. The filing came on 7 december 2001, Chapter 11, in northern california. EarthLink agreed to take substantially all of the assets, including the 32,000 subscribers and the platform they ran on, for a reported $5 million, subject to court approval and to anyone else bidding higher. Nobody did.

~ what happened to the subscribers ~

They kept working for another year and nine months. EarthLink ran the inherited CDPD service until midnight on 30 september 2003 and then closed it, because it was moving to CDMA 1x and the old hardware could not follow. Laptop users were offered a new card. Palm owners were offered nothing at all, and their sleds became battery packs with an aerial on the side.

The pricing argument outlived the company too. The same EarthLink executive who praised the software said the reason OmniSky had not worked was that people wanted to pay twenty dollars a month for this rather than forty. He was probably right and it made no difference, because within three years the answer to wireless data was a phone that did it with no second bill and no second device.

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