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Cox And Comcast To Dump @Home
randolph reports the drop of yet another shoe in the ongoing @Home tale: "The New York Times reports
that Cox and Comcast are ready to stop providing @Home's internet service, replacing it with some unnamed internet service. The story also comments 'AT&T may let At Home file for bankruptcy before making another investment in the company.'
Registration required, yada yada."
I was contacted recently by a Comcast recruiter (in the Philadelphia area) looking to staff up a new Comcast networking group. She said that they were dropping their relationship with @Home and were going to do it themselves. I don't know about Cox but Comcast is definitely taking the DIY route.
According to a source at Cox, Cox has been thinking of offering consumers a choice of multiple ISPs. Cox doesn't like @Home any more than the rest of us, but they had an exclusive contract, which it seems has now expired, or will soon expire. Cox has already done testing with Earthlink, so it's pretty much guaranteed that Earthlink will be one of the ISPs Cox offers. Whether or not they'll actually offer consumer choice remains to be seen, and I don't know about Comcast or AT&T.
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So, my local Comcast service is going to get weird for a bit, eh? Doesn't really surprise me, considering the level of service At Home provides.
Case in point: Bad cable modem - I tested it. Called At Home, hung up on. Called back, talked to 1st level tech, who hung up on me WHILE giving me the support call no. Called back, got call no., was transferred to second level, who hung up on me. Called back, tried to get directly to second level support, 1st level tech reluctantly sent me to 2nd level, who said hello and hung up on me. Turned out it was a switching problem, and I finally got a direct number (instead of the local office number-transfer) and called back. At Home (in Toronto; I'm in Tallahassee, FL) finally decided to route a repairman to bring me a new modem...an appointment 3 weeks later. Called my local Comcast office the next day, said, "I want to swap out my cable modem." Next day? Done. No worries.
The question: Why couldn't At Home do the exact same thing?
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
....I've got Comcast@Home! They wouldn't dare cut off my elite broadband service and relegate me back to the dark hole of 56KBaud modem service, would th
I asked for the estimated time when my service would resume, and they had to transfer me to a level 2 tech support desk for me to get that information.
Of course none of this tops what the installation guy tried to pull on me (this was before self install options). I had just bought a new windows box, and we were getting @Home service. When the guy came to hook up the cable modem, he disabled the network card (dunno if it was an accident or on purpose). Needless to say, the service wasn't working when he tried it out. He said there was a problem with my network card and that I would have to buy one from them for $80. I told him to look in the hardware profiles, and he did. Sure enough, the network card was disabled in the hardware profiles. I told him to re-enable the network card, but he refused and told me my card was simply not working with their service, and I'd have to buy one of theirs. I was pretty annoyed, but he kept trying to push me buying a network card from them. To get rid of him, I told him I'd call the manufacturer and then call him back. He agreed and left. I then re-enabled the card, and naturally everything worked fine.
To this day I don't know if the guy was just an idiot, or if he did it in purpose. Either way, it doesn't speak very well for @Home. Unfortunately, they were the only broadband provider in the area at the time, so I was stuck with them... or 56K.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
as usual, replace the 'www' with a 'archive' to bypass the useless sign in form.
or click here to have the article with a minimum of fuss.
...when I called Comcast sales to ask about @Work. They said, under @Home, all they could offer me in my area was a managed (and overpriced) connection for multiple workstations, no servers allowed, and bandwidth caps still in place. When I expressed some disappointment and incredulity at (a) the service, and (b) the price, they said it was all they could do under @Home, but if I waited, they would have alot wider range of services at better prices available "when we're offering our own service." Hmmm...
And this before I sat and thought about @Home's financial troubles...
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
However, there haven't been any infrastructure improvements that anyone's seen, bandwidth is now pretty harshly capped, especially on the upstream, and mail service gets flaky for some people on a regular basis.
I have a co-worker who hasn't had a RR connection for a month! They keep sending techs out, they've replaced everything in her house and it still flakes out an hour after the tech leaves! More than once they've been told "we'll send our top person out here to look at it" and that never happens. RR refuses to check anything beyond the walls of their house, but now that everything's been replaced with known good equipment, it's fairly obvious the problem isn't there.
Meanwhile, they're dropping the price of a second IP from $10/month to $5/month - so if you had already bought one, you won't see any price change in your bill. I think they know a very large number of people are running NAT boxes & routers and want to push them away from it.
I talked to some Comcast people earlier today about this. They're going to definitely drop @Home, but service won't be ending for their customers. They plan to continue offering high-speed internet access through their own network called "iComcast".
Any idea what the pricing will be like? Are they going to impose bandwidth caps unless you pay through the nose for "premium" service, or will basic service stay similar to what we have now? Any idea what the AUP is going to look like?
Is there any hope that we might have a choice of ISPs? I fear that some of the preliminary indicates on that page you linked to are very, severly alarming. Specifically, click on the "need help?" link. A window opens up, and Mozilla tells me that I need a plugin to view it something of type "application/x-Support.com-SmartIssue-Plugin". In addition to the empty "plugin content" box, there is the ominous text "Mac not supported." It goes without saying that Linux will not be supported either. If these people don't have enough of a clue to realize that on the web, help text and documentation should be in basic, simple HTML, then I tremble at the thought of what an ISP run by them would be like. (Run Our Windows Software For a Full Comcast Experience! Other OSes not supported.)
What is the real timescale for all of this?
Except for the "Need Help" scariness, most of the other links on the left side of that page you point do don't seem to exist yet.
-Rob
The partnership won't dissolve until June 2002, so do have time to get another ISP. Or, they could choose to make another deal with @Home between now and then.
From the end of the article:
That would be an improvement, yes?
It'd be a fscking miracle, too...
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