Excite@Home May Have To Call It Quits

Plazm writes: "C|net has a story (printer friendly version, of course) that just cropped up this morning about Excite@Home being in financial trouble. Will they befall the same fate as Covad and Loki? Good thing I just purchased my cable modem and broadband service through @Home last week so they could go out of business the next."

Comments

Giant Honking Market Opportunity

[dew]

If you wanted to get into the broadband deployment arena, now would be a really good fscking time to do so.

Fiber pipes nationally are wildly underlit nationally, DWDM technology is continuing to advance at a breakneck pace, and, relevant to this article, you'll have have no more competition, save Baby Bell DSL offerings.

Team up with the power companies! They own the rights of way to metro and suburban wiring ways and "telephone" poles already. (A "telephone" pole should be called a "power" pole because most of the time the telephone company is leasing space from the power company to string telephone wires on it!) They're being hit bad by this whole deregulation bit and are losing quite a bit of money. They'd be delighted to find a potential new revenue stream, especially in a market that's clamoring for access, but has no outlet.

Supply and Demand -- there's a dwindling supply and a growing demand. Market forces dictate that someone's gotta have the "can-do" to get the power companies to plug people in.

(BTW, I am not talking about using the power lines for transmission of data (many issues w/that), I'm talking about turning power companies into ISPs by stringing fiber along their rights of way.)

Someone go out there and do it!

Re:right time?

[supabeast!]

Excite@home is not going broke from their cable internet service. They are going broke from keeping up their stupid excite.com. They spend millions of dollars each month keeping a worthless portal that loses money at an astounding rate, for no reason other than that they might be able to sell it at some point, if anyone is stupid enough to invest in a failed web site. Excite needs to immediately shut down all things related to excite.com PERMANENTLY, lay off all the staff related to it, and then raise their cable rates.

Of course, being a bastion of the new economy, they will continue with their idiotic business plan, allowing their dotcom dreams to shut down what could be a successful broadband operation.

Congratulations are in order.

[BigBlockMopar]

Ironic that you now face being shunted into Microsoft environments - or out of technology -by the free market that your philosophy extolls as the engine of excellence.

Ironic and sad, yes.

Both laissez-faire capitalism and communism rely on the existence of humans that don't exist yet: the former on perfectly rational, completely informed agents, the latter on completely fair, totally socialized comrades. The failures of each system are based on the fact that humans are not that easy to reinvent.

Congratulations, you have done what few lack the ability to do: change my viewpoint.

Through your concise and relevant comment, you have managed to make me re-think a couple of points. While I'm still fundamentally a Libertarian, there has long been a need to have some sort of government intervention in the Microsoft monopoly, a rare exception to my usual philosophy of letting the free market decide.

But this does reinforce the need for a truly impartial government to oversee all facets of the running of a society; as one of the few moderates who hasn't simply posted "socialism is best" or some other similar rant, your point has reminded me that the balance does remain the best system. Certainly, in Canada, all levels of government provide substantial roadblocks to creating your own business, as an example; controls need to remain (as much as I loathe to admit it), though they should be simpler, more streamlined and efficient than those currently in place.