Comcast Bidding To Buy AT&T's Cable-Modem Unit

jobugeek writes: "Comcast is making a bid to buy AT&T's cable modem unit for over 44 billion. That would combine the #1 and #3 cable modem providers in the U.S." If this deal should really happen, it would create the country's largest broadband provider. I wonder which of these two has better technical support, installation speed, etc.

Comments

The "@Home" offerings aren't all the same

[isdnip]

I have AT&T @Home now, but it was Road Runner until last week. Nothing changed except the name and their home page. This was MediaOne before, not TCI, and MediaOne runs their own cable modem system, tying in to AT&T's national Internet backbone. The mail server's a bit slow and I'm having trouble posting via the news server, but basic connectivity is excellent and reliable. This is near Boston.

The old TCI systems, on the other hand, let @Home do real work for them. From what I hear it hasn't worked out so well. I really think AT&T would like to put @Home out of its misery. They made a mistake going pubilc with it; now they have public minority shareholders they can't screw.

I think Comcast pretty much does their own thing too, albeit with an @Home label. As cablecos go, it's a high-class outfit too, more like MediaOne than TCI. But do note that over half of their current service area was not theirs two years ago -- they did a huge swap with AT&T/TCI as part of the MediaOne deal. (Comcast tried to buy it; AT&T outbid them and owed them a $1B breakup fee, which was paid in the form of cable subscribers. They have been swapping systems to create larger, more contiguous clusters.) So lots of Comcast systems are old TCI systems, which usually means "fix-er-uppers".

The big question for this deal is concentration: AT&T had some legal problems taking over MediaOne, because they ended up owning more than a 30% prorated share of the national CATV market. That law's legality is questionable, but Comcast-AT&TB would be WAY over the mark. And I don't think AT&T has finalized their divestiture of 25% ownership of Time Warner Entertainment.

AT&T@Home vs Comcast@Home

[Paranoid]

I've used way too many @Home providers. I've moved around a bit... Comcast@Home in Newport Beach, Orange County, CA. Cox@Home in San Diego, CA. Currently I'm using AT&T@Home in South Lake Tahoe, CA.

Comcast@Home only went down once in the half-year I used them... their stability is definately acceptable. In Orange County, my connection limits were 15k/sec outgoing, 500k/sec incoming. The basic service is a static IP setup, which never changed.

Cox@Home only went down once in the half-year I used them... their service is definately acceptable as well. In San Diego, my connection limits were 35k/sec outgoing, 400k/sec incoming. The basic service is a static IP setup, which never changed.

I've had AT&T@Home service for 2 months now. I've had two outages so far. I'm not sure if its their fault, as Tahoe wiring tends to end up being shredded and turned into squirrel nesting. They do NOT offer static IPs, period. Nor do they offer higher grades of connection... the base-level consumer cablemodem is the only form of network access they provide. I checked, I hate DHCP. Right now, my connection limits are 15k/sec outgoing, probably 500k/sec incoming, but I have yet to see over 320k/sec. They also have these inexplicable patches of half-connectivity where 50% of packets are dropped, causing pretty much everything to pause. These last probably 30 seconds, occur all the time, and I have no idea whats causing them. A tree farted, or something. No idea if its their fault or not - local conditions are occasionally harsh.

Of the three, Cox had the best service. I wish more broadband providers would run their service like Cox does. Its simply astounding how much those extra 20k/sec (outgoing) matter. Many protocols have tons of ACKs, and both Comcast and AT&T don't really allow enough outgoing bandwidth to make the most of the incoming. Plus, for some reason, Cox doesn't slow down when you're uploading a file to someone else... it simply drops packets instead of keeping 100k of queue and incurring 10 second ping replies. Which makes for a more useable connection, overall. I wonder if broadband providers will ever realize this, or if they even care (hey, they're beating 56k, what else does the customer want).

Overall, I hope this goes through and we switch to Comcast. That is, assuming they're still using the same setup and they're able to provide the same level of service. In addition, Comcast's techs actually knew what they were doing, unlike AT&T's.

In any case, I'm glad I haven't been subjected to PPPoE (yet).

Disclaimer: Comcast may be run by evil tribbels from Venus's core who enjoy eating peoples faces and blowing things up. AT&T may be On A Mission From God. I could just be an extreme outlier, my experience unique and completely different from the average. Or I could be from Alpha Centuari (I'm not, as far as I know).


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Paranoid