AOL Time Warner Netscape CNN... and AT&T?

Baldrson noted a bit running on Yahoo right now where the AOL, Time, Warner, Netscape, CNN mega corporation is in talks with AT&T for their cable network. The inevitable and scary consolidation continues ever onward. The US govt will be sold on eBay in a few years, but only Microsoft and the corporation formerly known as Netscape AOL Warner CNN AT&T Time (NAWCAT) will be left to bid. But since Nawcat will already own ebay, there will no doubt be rumors of unfair play.

Comments

what's the big deal?

[UM_Maverick]

Everybody knows that AT&T Broadband is for sale. It only makes sense that another cable company would be the one making the purchase. Comcast made the first offer, Cox is rumored to be interested, of course AOLTW is going to be interested. It makes sense for them. This isn't so much an evil megalo-corp bent on world domination as it is a large company that probably can't hit growth targets without making acquisitions.

And as far as size goes, there are plenty of companies out there that would dwarf AOLTW...some people need to calm down and take a look at the world before freaking out...

Who owns what

[Barbara Streisand]

An interesting resource guide to what the major media companies own.

Re:Road Runner Users

[naChoZ]

I work for RR and I'd like to know how it's going to affect us too... ;)

Seriously though, the fcc is mandating that RR open up the pipes for other ISP's to offer cable modem service. First on the list, Earthlink. 15 seconds (yes, it's in the court order, 15 seconds) after Earthlink gets their 1st cable modem subscriber, AOL is allowed to start offering their service via cable modem.

Pain in the ass for us because we've had to do a whole lot of work on the back-end systems and provisioning stuff so that they can be provisioned according to which ISP they're subscribing.

This stuff with AT&T is a little confusing because after AT&T bought MediaOne, they were ordered to divest of all their shares of RR, which they did. AT&T in the Boston area is still using the RR brand itself, but they actually aren't an RR affiliate any longer. They'll be discontinuing their use of the RR brand sometime soon, I'm told.

I do know that AT&T was really impressed with the way RR did business. Their @home offering is just ridiculous compared to RR. They thought they could just have this big cable modem operation by bringing in a bunch of 3rd party vendors to build the shit, drop it in place and it would just run... NOT. When they saw how RR does things, I think they realized how aweful their operation was. I even heard that @home was giving customers static ip addresses in some divisions (don't know if this is still the cast)... While that may sound attractive to end users who want to run servers, what they don't realize is that it pretty much prevents growth. When utilization in a particular area grows, you need to be able to split the area up, which requires an ip renumber. If you can't renumber because everyone has a static, pretty soon the area is going to get horribly oversold resulting in super-slow access.

So, as far as how it affects RR users, it shouldn't, really. I suspect RR is just going to be another service offering, so it will be one of your choices of ISP's, pretty much. The worst case basis is that RR simply becomes a delivery vehicle for aol... *%!$ that noise...