Slashdot Mirror
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."
for (no) customer service, it's not really surprising. I have never heard anything positive said about excite@home
I can see it now. Hungry unemployed IT workers lined up at the @homeless shelter.
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
Does anybody happen to know WHY these cable Internet companies are going under? They have more business than they can keep up with, which is usually a good thing, unless you're not pricing your product high enough to make a profit. Is that the problem? I'm really stumped, here.
my hopes to hear the Buggles do an update and re-release called "Internet Killed the Video Star."
My sister worked at a Wherehouse at a local mall which went of business. She got a job at this pizza place which then went out of business. Then over to Kmart whose stock turned to junk bond status. Guess I should ask where she's working these days...
So if excite@home goes under, does that mean large chunks of Canada will only have one broadband ISP? (Telus in BC & Alberta as both Shaw & Rogers networks are part of excite@home).
;)
If so, will Telus (or whoever it is in your province) leave broadband at $40CDN a month? Are the rumors that they're required by the government to keep it that low really true?
And even more importantly. Do we get to keep our cable modems?
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
The article mentions AT&T being their biggest investor, but I was wondering if this affects AT&T@Home customers as well (namely me)...
Broadband too cannot be supported, especially with the baby-bell competition hitting the area. I'd honestly prefer to pay $70+ if it would keep the competition and quality available.
I'm just glad I'm on DSL instead of @home... (switched 8 months ago)
I'm sure someone else *cough*AOL*cough* wouldn't mind expanding their own network by taking over Excite@Home...
It sure hasn't kept competition alive. All that's happening is the services that are worse than what I have and don't offer what I need are the ones that are surviving.
Thank you phone companies. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. There is a special place reserved in my personal hell for you.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
...NOT. this guy should have been fired for talking up all of these companies.
sulli
RTFJ.
I'm just glad I'm on DSL instead of @home... (switched 8 months ago)
COVAD filed for bankrupcy protection about a week ago. I think they are the last CLECK. Who ownes your DSL wire?
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
It does not directly focus on costs towards the customer. It just means that it should offer wholesale service for xDSL to ISPs at a price that would allow them to be competitive. (Kind of silly, really... and Bell etc got around it anyway with the concept that the price & profit could be achieved with only 5,000+ customers)
If they wanted to jack up the price, I'm pretty sure they could. They'd just have to allow other ISPs to offer at the same amount.
I would take crappy cable modem service over crappy dial up service any day. I can't get DSL so I do care.
Really, now. There's a huge demand for broadband, but no one can seem to stay in business even with hundreds of customers (both consumers and businesses) forking over lots of money each month for the service.
In an era of dot-coms with no revenue stream whatsoever staying in business for years, how is it that these companies are going broke?
Will they befall the same fate as Covad and Loki?
Loki has just filed chapter 11 (protection from creditors) not chapter 7 (liquidation). Please don't call Loki gone until they do. They still have a very good chance to pull through.
Other major organizations have filed chapter 11, and still are major companies to this day. Sorry this is a touch off topic, but Loki ain't dead yet.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
@Home killed themselves when they merged with Excite: @Home, which had a solid prospect of a large scale profitable business, decided that they just HAD to dilute their value by merging with a absurdly overvalued search engine that was headed into the great abyss (Excite has been on a major decline while engines like Google conquer the market). While they've tried to make some value out of the Excite merger, as an @Home customer I have never used the Excite pages except to transition to the member services pages. Even the so called "Broadband" version is simplistic and borish.
As another poster mentioned though, @Home really is marketing and some peering agreements: I'm on Cogeco and they will continue if @Home fails, and likewise Rogers and Shaw will be just as strong.
It's ironic that this is occuring right now as I just finished reading the National Post over lunch, and one of the stories detailed the fact that cable modems are being installed twice as fast as DSL. You would think that these would be the good times for @Home.
I have been a customer of excite for over a year now and have been pleased with what they have to offer.
Of course, here in Oklahoma the bandwidth is plentiful, except right at 5:00pm and for about 30 to 60 minutes thereafter.
I have even been impressed with their technical support. All you have to do is tell level one support things you know they can't comprehend and they bump you right along. Level 2 is pretty proficient in most regards. On to the point of this post....
In my opinion these ISPs are dropping out due to the burden of competing with simpler solutions, ie AOL and the like. Notice I did not say better solutions, just simpler to the average joe schmoe, I don't know a god damn thing about computers. These burdens I speak of is infrastructure. The cost of deploying the connectivity and not being able to convert the AOL magots.
They then tend to get into the pitfall that we need to conquer more areas and that gets them into dept and without a controlled growth rate that they can easily fund themselves they become so overwhelmed in debt that they topple under the load.
Well, my two cents, do with as you will
--Too many holes so little time(You sick bastard!!...I was talking about software!)
AOL also costs half as much. Some dialups are 1/4 the cost of broadband.
As so many other Canadians have chimed in, broadband is thriving north of the border. I love Rogers@Home, except for the few months a while back when they were totally fuggered up....
My cable's been solid as granite for the last several months, and I've had nothing but love for it.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Sheesh, if they can't make money charging their current prices, stop expanding. Wait for a while. Hold it out. Wait till the money starts coming in, but please, I'm paying them something like 35 bucks/month, so are many of my neighbors. If they just sit on their ass for a while and stop expanding like the plauge, they won't keep digging themselves into debt.
I know that I'm about to commit some kind of /. heresy by saying this, but I LOVE MY @ HOME SERVICE! I've had it in two apartments, got super-fast installation (in the case of the 2nd apt, they showed up on the day I moved in... I had @home server before I had phone service). I also have a static IP, for which I do not pay extra, but I hear that they are moving away from that.
But, I will say that I only use it for the fat-pipe aspect. I don't use their email and don't use their web-hosting service (host my own, baby... and they haven't filtered web server traffic/port 80 as some people say they have.)
Please, oh please, don't make Pac Bell the only fat-pipe provider in CA/SF Bay Area. If it takes months to get installed and people calling for customer service are on hold for hours, how bad will it be if Covad and @home crap out?
"Hello, Pac Bell DSL? Yes, I'll hold... yes, I am bent over... yes, the broom stick handle does have splinters...yes, I will call you 'Daddy'..."
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
I can see it now. Hungry unemployed IT workers lined up at the @homeless shelter.
Ugh. The wolf is @ our door, boys and girls.
I blame it all on people who were stupid enough to buy shares of a company that promised to save consumers money by FedExing a $4.00, 30lb bag of kitty litter across the country. $21 shipping bill later, two day delivery time, versus going to the local bricks-and-mortar pet shop at the local mall, shelling out $6 and having a happy cat right away.
<sarcasm>There's a good business model. How can it fail?</sarcasm>
<more_sarcasm>Now that e-tailers have been brought back to reality and Napster is dead for all practical purposes, there's still no reason for broadband. No need for the convenience and power of having all the world's information at your fingertips. No reason why an AOL dialup account can't satisfy all your surfing needs.</more_sarcasm>
And now, as a result of idiocy of that scale across virtually the entire stock market, I find myself unemployed and unable to find a decent job. This really sucks.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I used to work for an @Home MSO. (I forget the meaning of the acronym, basically they resell @Home internet connectivity over their own cable lines.) Well anyways, after the initial year of the 5 year service contract with @Home, a lot of them employees stopped liking them so much. In fact, a lot of the IT guys that were really happy with @Home's network layout, were getting kind of upset with their technical contacts within @Home. Stuff like poor response time, terrible email/news server uptimes. Generally, customers would bitch and bitch about miscellaneous problems with their service, and @Home would take weeks to fix them. Even minor issues would take days. (How hard is it to kill an email account and create a new one with the same name?!)
So what is the solution? Simple. You have a customer base, you have people pratically breaking your doors down to get your service, but you can't stand the ISP you're going through. Let's see...cable company with lots of money...needs high speed internet backbones...money...backbones...hey, doesn't MCI, the Bells, Sprint, Qwest, and about 100 other telco/data service companies sell internet connections??? Hey, lets get our own OC-192!
And thus, @Home doesn't get the contract renewal when the current one runs out. Not only that, but these contracts are specified in terms of geographical area, not just in terms of the companies that signed it. So, if the cable company expands (which they always are), nothing says that the new customers have to be @Home customers. The cable company can use their revunues from existing @home customers to build an independant infrastructure, and use that to independantly serve all new customers outside of the original area.
Result? @Home doesn't make enough money to cover their startup costs. And they file chapter 7 within years of initial creation.
It seems to me that @Home suffers from the same disease that a lot of other broadband providers do -- they don't really care if you're their customer or not.
This can be seen in their terrible customer service (and I don't just mean tech support) -- I've never seen a company where the sales team was less inclined to help you subscribe. It's as if I signed up for a magazine only to be told I had to staple the thing together myself.
I realize that individual customers don't mean a lot when you have a few hundred thousand, but they must treat everyone this way. That's *got* to hurt the bottom line.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Can I use my moderator points to mod down this article as ignorant? Is Tim ever going to learn the difference between Chapter 11 bankruptcy and liquidation? "Calling it quits" and filing for Chapter 11 are not the same thing, man.
When you factor in the cost of a second phone line (about $20-25/mo where I live), plus the cost of a decent ISP (another 15-20 bucks), @home and dsl are very competitively priced. In fact, for our family, broadband was cheaper than a second phone line + 'net access. Unfortunately, many people don't know their options or are turned off by a $45/mo price upfront.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I think/hope Charter is next.
Of all the broadband compaines out there, Charter is still the best. From my experience they all suck. Charter has problems, but my connection is constantly >128K/sec. Incoming port 80 never got blocked, and with the exception of their cable techs, their service seems good. I hope Charter is the last to go. Actually, I hope they don't go so I don't have to resort to dialup. Those $%#$^&$@'n bastards from the "other" cable company ran fiber to my house and I can't get DSL without spending a pile of $$ for a copper pair.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
[[ full disclosure: I work for an @home company ]]
I don't think that the subscribers are going to get hurt here. @home is controlled by AT&T Broadband, which itself is "on the market", being wooed by many companies. Many of these companies are particularly interested in @home's 3.6 million subscribers.
Even if @home tanks, (which, I have no reason to think it will not) AT&T, and whomever buys it (which is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point, just a matter of who, for what price) has great reason to keep the current subscribers very happy in the near and long-term future.
[[ further disclosure: This shouldn't in any way constitute as "insider information". All of this is my speculation, gathered from multiple internet sources, all of which being available to the general public. @home does not keep its employees informed. ]]
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
...that @Home's rich crop of spammers just might be to blame for their current troubles?
Think about it: Lots of admins (myself included -- I have LARGE amounts of @Home's IP space in our mailserver's local 'Deny' files) start blocking mail traffic, legitimate or not, from @Home's IP space due to spammer infestations. Personally, with only ONE exception, every single piece of mail I've seen from @Home in the past two years has been spam.
Anyway, @Home users get ticked off because, all of a sudden, they can't mail baby pictures to Aunt Gracie on Orville's Internet Service in Flyspeck, OH. Why? Because Orville's is blocking traffic from @Home. Orville's other users AND admins were complaining about the spam load from @Home, and Orville himself decided to do something about it.
Ticked-off @Home customers bail when @Home can't/won't do anything about their network's spammers. @Home loses revenue. @Home's share price drops. @Home sinks like the Titanic.
At the risk of sounding mean and nasty, I'm not going to cry very much for @Home. Their demise means only one thing to me: Less disk space taken up on my servers due to reduced size of my 'Deny' file.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
It's the backbone, caching, homepages, excite, email, and tech support. Totally commodity stuff that cablecos can easily do themselves now. Back in the day, cablecos were so non-savvy that they gladly signed exclusive agreements with @home so they wouldn't have to do this, but the world has changed in the last several years. I predict that even if @Home dies, service will continue as normal.
sulli
RTFJ.
Cable companies give you the link to the @home backbone, @home gives web access, mail, homepage, startpage, and a stupid browser skin...
Cable companies are doing fine, they'll just need to dump you out onto the web from somewhere else and find you a different email service. Personally, I think what they offered as a start page was revenue generating comercially driven trash. Sales pitches weaved into the headlines like they're something new and all that kind of lame stuff. I'm going to be glad to see them go. this will speed up the opening of cable networks and give options when you sign up for cable modem connnections.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
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!
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
It costs on average for a small ISP 1,500-2,000$ for a T1 (1.5mbs) Internet link. This is in addition to the 400-600$ for the local loop charges. It costs 12,000$ give or take for a partial T3 (45mbs). With broadband companies trying to give every residential customer between 350kbps and 1.5mbps of bandwidth for 39.95$ a month, the figures just do not add up. When you provide someone a service they will use it simply because they can. This means that the broadband companies must add additional bandwidth to handle the users that abuse the system. This increases costs and ensures that they can not afford to continue to offer the service. What is required in my opinion is legislation (waits for the boos and hisses to stop) to require the Regional Bell Operating companies to lower the over priced bandwidth costs to the Internet service companies. I do not mean just for the large corporations but also for the mom and pop ISP's in your neighborhood. If the bandwidth is available to the ISP's they can then turn around and make it available for their users.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
It is, or was, a chain music store.
Best Slashdot Co
Still surfing on my TimeWarner RoadRunner cable modem and my BellSouth ADSL modem in Florida!
Sometimes dealing with a monopoly is nice. (Yes I realize that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
"And like that
There were rumors that Metricom and Ricochet were still selling modems up to the day they shut off the network (Aug. 8).
The auction was done on Aug. 16. There are no details as yet, but the reports read like the spectrum was all the value it had left. The equipment may truly have been sold for scrap.
Bookmark this Yahoo News search for articles that might soon reveal the truth, or its journalistic equivalent, the facts.
--Blair
what bugs me about this (and dotcoms) is that the 'normal' business model (the one i learned in college) works on a five year profitability timetable. the idea is that if you can not turn a profit in the first five years, then your business plan does not work. some dotcoms came and went within three years! how does one
A. get money for a business plan
B. spend 25% of it on stupid stuff
C. not get shot by investors
broadband providers (other than the bells or existing cable providers) seem to be dropping like flies. i know that @home is in bed with att, but what is wrong with @home's business plan? are they trying to grow too fast? are they buying expensive chairs? does it cost more to provide the service than they are charging?
i personally know that covad has an excuse, because i have dealt with verizon (bellatlantic, nynex, and nj bell before them) on several occasions. in nyc the folks doing installations have been known to disconnect existing service while installing new service and then claim that they will have to charge you to fix the existing service. covad got shafted left and right by verizon.
until the telecommunication providers are deregulated and re-regulated with realistic rules (many are still from the breakup of ATT 17 years ago) there will be little government help with consumer broadband needs.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
The problem with that statement, as usual, is that it ignores the fact that DSL was rolled out more places 2 years ago.
(disclaimer: I'm in Toronto, so will ignore Telus' Western operations for the moment)
I signed up for Sympatico's DSL the month after it became available, January 1999. At that point, @Home's projected availabillity in my neighbourhood was Summer 2000. Then it was Fall 2000. Then it was "Please check back for availability." My upstairs housemate switched from Sympatico to @Home as soon as it became available, namely earlier this year.
So, while it may appear that cable modems are being installed at twice the rate of DSL now, it doesn't take into account how much earlier DSL was available over the last 2 years.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Roger's has been in debt for *years* and still has no forseeable date for getting out of the red.
Hell, they just bought the Toronto Blue Jays for $millions.
Everytime they sense an opportunity to get into another market, they buy in without care as to how to make the bottom line increase. They bought out Maclean-Hunter to get their cable business, and I hear they're doing the same thing to Shaw.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
Everyone's got a story. Mine has, for the last 18 months, been very positive. In addition to a consistently stable and fast connection, I've even experienced suprisingly competent network support.
I'm running a linux firewall on a static IP in front of my home network. Life without @Home would totally suck.
My question, though: why doesn't Comcast buyout @Home? They have more than enough money to do so, and @Home provides a service to Comcast that keeps me with the company.
They're probably bluffing if they say they can detect NAT. I "DROP" packets and reject much ICMP functionality. A simple portscan on this box is a ten minute exercise in frustration. As a bonus nmap thought it was CISCO router (it isn't). I suppose they could get really cute and watch things like browser id strings but even those are spoofed to get around "problem" websites.
Just how are they going to find out anything about black hole looking boxes like mine?
If you knew what really goes on inside an ISP, you'd be amazed that anything ever works. Hiring idiots who cannot drive a mouse and firing all the "expensive" people who really know their shit only makes things that much more difficult.
(I've watched this sort of shit for almost a decade now.)
Welcome to the real world. See that? I'm crying. Oh, woe is you. That's called capitalism. That's the "old economy" for you.
Very, very true. And, based on the karma hits I've taken for espousing a Libertarian philosophy, I do want you to understand that I'm not down about that.
The problem is that tech seems to be a bad word now, especially to headhunters. I don't have 14 university degrees; what I have is a practical hands-on ability, honed by 17 years of computer experience, to make systems work in real-world environments.
Have you been to a headhunter lately? It pains me when they're asking for MCSEs. *MCSEs*. I used to have MCSEs under me; they'd ask me questions like why they have to type an IP address to point to a domain name server, or how to prevent HIMEM.SYS loading when the machine starts up. (I've ranted about this on Slashdot before.) It's a paper qualification, not indicative of any real insight into how a Windows machine works. Nor do I even wish to be trapped in the Windows prison. Yet, headhunters seem to want it. [sigh]
Who the hell came up with this "new economy" slogan anyways? Exactly what is so "new" about it? Nothing, other than the fact that a bunch of young, naive idiots managed to convince some old money that their ideas were "foolproof" as in "you fools can't tell we've got no idea what the hell we're doing."Engineering saying: Make something foolproof, and someone comes along and builds a better fool.
But here you are whining about your misfortune. Are you mad you were suckered in too? Are you bitter because you feel it was "owed" to you? Do you think you have it hard? You're probably an intelligent person and you can probably actually perform your job duties.I like to think I'm intelligent. Actually, I did write the Mensa test, and I passed it. Even went to a couple of Mensa meetings, but got bored with hanging around with people who had nothing better to do than attempt to demonstrate to each other how intelligent they are.
No, I didn't get suckered in by the new economy. The problems were evident all the way along. For the most part, it's failing e-tailers that seem to have dragged everything else down. Well, using a mail-order analogy, why would you buy a bag of kitty litter by mail-order when there's a pet store right down the street?
E-tailing, of course, has its merits. Mail order (which is all that e-tailing really is) cannot be beaten as a way of buying specialized items. Antique car parts. Strange transistor types. Even that needlepoint pattern that my best friend's girlfriend has been looking all over for.
In the frucus before the bubble burst, it seemed that people had lost sight of common sense, and we've all been dragged down because of it. I lament *that*, not capitalism.
That alone puts you ahead of most of the other lobos (think lobotomy) "looking" for a job (more accurately, looking for a new job that's exactly like their old job).Well, I'm not looking for something exactly like my old job, no. I'd prefer something where my combination of electronics, computers and technical writing experience can work together to save/make my new employer money. But, at this point, I have a friend who is a tow truck driver, and I've been moonlighting doing that and a few other things to pay the bills.
Maybe try and industry that isn't part of the "new economy."Certainly have. There's no aversion for me to work for a bricks-and-mortar company. I've never worked for a start-up. I've always worked for established companies. That's not to say that I wouldn't love the excitement and pace of a new venture - I would. All the run-off from failed dot-coms are swamping every other sector, and that makes it pretty hard for your signal to rise above the noise and reach the ear of a potential employer.
One of the reasons I've been posting to Slashdot a *lot* lately is to get myself heard by like-minded people who might even be in hiring positions. So far, it's worked reasonably well, I've been getting hundreds of hits a day to my website, and many of those hits check out my resume.
Try civil service. Perhaps the police, fire department, military, IRS, FBI, etc. They're not going away any time soon.I live in Toronto, and I've already done that.
I'm an able-bodied white, anglo-saxon protestant male. WASP. With employment equity in full force across all levels of Canadian government, I submitted my resume, clicked off the boxes asking me my ethnicity and stuff, and received a couple of e-mails back telling me that I didn't reflect the demographics they desired.
If you can't find a job locally, it's time to move. "Oh, I can't move, I love it here." You'll love it too, when you can't pay your rent and you're out on the street.At this point, gladly. Gladly. I live in Toronto, the heart of all of Canada's commerical and industrial activity. Toronto is Canada's equivalent to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit all rolled into one. And it's still pretty dead here. Ottawa is the other option, and it's very similar to Silicon Valley; it's even got the nickname, "Silicon Valley North". With Mitel, Corel, Nortel and innumerable failed start-ups, it's hurting even more than Toronto. So, unless an employer were to see my resume and decide that they wished to sponsor me for immigration into the United States, those are my options, and Toronto is decidedly better than Ottawa at the moment.
Take charge of your life.Of course. I'm motivated almost to the point of obsessiveness about reaching goals.
It's hard to stay optimistic and upbeat when you set a goal of finding a job by the end of the week, and again it doesn't happen.
I've stood at Bay and King (Toronto's equivalent to Wall Street) in my best suit, holding up a sign that says "Computer Geek For Hire.... Will Work For Bandwidth". Because of the humorous and practical approach, I got a lot of attention - even so far as a couple of TV interviews. Got to pass out lots of resumes and follow up with lots of people who gave me business cards.
And from all that, *one* interview. One. I present myself well, and I'm friendly and professional. Needless to say, I didn't get that job. (They were looking for an Assembly language programmer. I haven't written in Assembly in over ten years now.)
Even though I remind myself that it's a numbers game, the truth is that when someone quits a job in the IT department at a bank or something, generally, they don't seem to re-hire.
Computer geeks seem to have become about as desireable as 8-tracks.
You took a chance at (fame and) fortune and you lost. If you don't want to lose, don't play the game.Don't have much choice, do I? Again, I'm not lamenting capitalism. I'm lamenting the idiocy of those who built the tech bubble up so much that when it burst, it affected companies and people with sound business ideas and skills.
You'll never get rich when you're unemployed.Tell me about it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
YES! at&t, cox, whoever is your local cable service company has done deals with excite@home to bring you htat service. if excite@home dies, well... i'll have to battle Qwest for DSL.. :(
buildmeasite.com!
My cousin is a financial analyst at Excite. When I visited her in Redwood City in June, she said they would love to get rid of it, but it they can't give it away, might even have to pay someone to take it. There must be some shutdown costs or it would have been gone long ago. She laughs when she talks about how much @home paid to become excite@home, something like $7.1 Billion (yes, that's thousand million). Worth less than nothing. How's that for making a small fortune?
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
Most broadband ISPs state that you can have only one computer connected to the cable modem. They don't state how many computers can be connected to that computer. One computer, two NICs, and life will be good.
I find this news especially odd because my local cable provider recently lowered the rates for @Home customers (quite a surprising move, IMO).
It's not that surprising. Many of the cable companies grossly overestimated the demand. They got caught up in the whole fantasy about the "new dot-com economy" and everyone telecommuting, taking courses online, and getting all of their content on demand. Bandwidth, in the commercial sector, has dropped considerably, allowing the cable modem companies to sell their services cheaper and still make a profit. So now many of them have cut rates in order to get their user base up.
As an @Home customer, it pisses me off that they took a solid infrastructure business and wrecked it because they wanted to be Yahoo. Broadband over cable TV lines -- simple, powerful, doable. By now they should be rich enough to found a quasi-nation and buy an aircraft carrier. Or whatever they would want to do with $10^10.
But no, instead they got feverish with dotcom mania. They really thought that megabit internet access was just a stepping stone to the real money -- banner ad revenue on their web portal. I'm not making this up, honest! That's why they spent $780 million on BlueMountain, a loss-leader greeting card site, among other dot-bombs.
So now they're low on cash and their backbone needs maintenance (duh). If they shut off cable modem service I'll have to smack someone. I'd rather commute to my office than use phone modem again.
Rogers' initial cable deployment was in Richmond Hill. For the full rollout, they basically headed south down Yonge, branching east and west as they went.
I'm downtown (was at Dupont, now College), so HSE was available down here first.
Like the other poster in London, it totally depends on where you are. That's why I restricted my comments to Toronto and not Canada. Who know what Telus is doing out there?! :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Well spoken.
That's not to say that I wouldn't love the excitement and pace of a new venture - I would. All the run-off from failed dot-coms are swamping every other sector, and that makes it pretty hard for your signal to rise above the noise and reach the ear of a potential employer.
Your initial post could have been any dot-commer crying about how their future is ruined. To be honest, what scares me is that "noise" is applying for jobs well above their head (and ass, they're in the same place, right?).
My job is fine for now, my boss wouldn't fire me for the world, but at the same time, I can't believe all the HTML web-monkeys who think they should be sysadmins/programmers just because their VCR doesn't flash 12:00. If I had to compete against these morons, could I?
Your frustration appeared (to me) to be dot-com-whiner syndrome.
You do raise a valid point that I think is important to reiterate.
The run-off is polluting the geek pool. But if you're swimming in the shallow end with the rest of the lobos, just stand up. You'll be heads and shoulders above the rest.
Perhaps you might want to try another headhunter. If they're not selling your skills (despite people wanting MCSEs -- maybe you should get that cert if it will get you a job) then it's time to switch. Maybe you've done that and still no luck. If that's the case, I'd go out on my own and sell my services. Get creative. If you're not going to get the job anyway it can't hurt to go a bit overboard trying to convince a potential employer that you're the right one to hire.
I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying I can do it. But I realize it can be frustrating and it seems to me that you are one of the few the signals above the noise (run-off).
bfore you start panicking find out who your network-layer provider really is.
IUn my case its AT&T through TCI, which they bought.
Even if @Home goes under I strongly suspect AT&T will contiue to offer my cable modem and just switch toa different ISP servcies provider.
BTW a few more comments:
(1) I've had an AT&T @Hoem mdoem for a few yearsnow and generally found it highly reliable. Its porbably area dependant but in my area its MUCh more reliable then the IDSl we had efor awhile.
(2) I have some pity/sympathy for @Home. They invested TONS fo money in the infrastructure for Cable modem long before anyone knew it would be successful. Inre turn for this early invetment they acquired lock-ind eals with the various low level carriers like TCI to be the onew ISp provider on their lines.
Flash foward 3 years or so, cable mdoem is finally taking off and AOL and some other big ISPs go whining to the FCC that NOW they want in on cable modems, without having made the risky upfront investment to get it all started. The FCC caves and takes @Home's bought and paid for market advanatge away.
This was BAD call of the FCC. They really shoudl have at elast given @Home a 5 year period or so onc the amrekt cae alive to establish themselves before makign trhem open the mqrket up to agressive compettitors like AOL and MSN.
I know I'd think twice about ivnesting early in a new medium, based on what happened here.
Go to Excite and what do you see? "My News". "My Weather". "My Horoscope". "My Chat Events". "Change Excite Colors" (Wow, even Yahoo doesn't have that!). Will anybody miss that stuff?
Yes but how many of them would use it if they had to pay enough for it for Excite to make a profit on it? Probably not many. When I said worthless, I meant worthless from the standpoint of someone who sees little value in a corporate albatross.
This link is to the Australian Excite@home press release on the subject. Basically, Optus@home will be buying them out, and it will be business as normal.