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Mobilestar Less Mobile; Excite@Home Less Exciting
jc1 writes: "MobileStar, provider of 802.11b wireless LAN connectivity throughout 500 of the USA's Starbucks cafes, has laid off 88 of its staff, which a source described as "everybody". With the demise in August of Metricom's Ricochet service, one is left to wonder if there is a business to be made in providing public wireless Internet services." Or any broadband internet access at all - Excite@Home, currently in bankruptcy proceedings, has stopped taking any new orders.
All these people are being laid off, and now they'll be sitting around in Starbucks without even having any connectivity.
It must be Bert. He's plotting against internet now that his story is out.
I loved my cable modem. I had it for 3+ years, worked flawlessly, good upload speed, GREAT upload speed, all the stuff you know.
OK, now I live in an area that isn't wired yet, and Comcast's predictions as to when it will get here seem to be rolling out into the future.
Meanwhile, Comcast here in Maryland seems to be endlessly running ads for new people to sign up. I wonder what will happen there?
Meanwhile, being 30k+ feet from my CO means that I am anxiously awaiting the installation of my ISDN line, complete with per minute charges. Blech!
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
Path to Profitability.
2 years ago, it was get a customer base, then figure out how to exploit them to make a profit. Now people have realized that there are no barriers to entry, so you can't raise prices later. You have to show up front how you can make money off of each and every customer from day one, then hope you get enough of them to overcome useless overhead in the corporation (read, the CEO, CTO, C??, and much of the marketing dept.)
The days of giving away dollar bills for 3 quarters to generate revenue are over for the internet, show me how you can make money, or go the way of the Dodo bird
Well I'm also a source, please quote me as saying 88 is, "not quite half" of their employees. There. Now it is cast as fact and not even the trolls can dispute it.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
I moved from DSL to Cable - mostly because of the price/bandwidth issues of DSL. Yes I have got over 441kilobytes per second - quite often too over cable. That much bandwidth on DSL would cost me (if I could get it - which I can't) anywhere from 240-400$ per month. I've purchased 7mbps dsl for a company I used to work for - and I've rarely seen it go over 300kilobytes per second and just the bandwidth cost 240$.
:).
I sure hope they don't shut down the cable networks - because I kinda like it here
My ATT@Home service died mysteriously yesterday. Haven't had a chance to call support yet...
No changes to the setup by me, the 'Cable' light was still blinking, so the physicial connection between my computer and the central hub was operational, but neither Windows (via the shit @HOME software) nor Linux (via dhcpcd) will connect. Both worked fine less then 13 hours earlier.
It's all speculation at this point, but what a coincicence...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
You may disagree and claim that somebody can sell a CD full of the necessary tools for Windows users. Indeed this may be possible, but it will never rival the ease with which a Linux vendor can put together a Linux distro. And that is because each of the shareware programs has its own unique license, which may or may not permit redistribution and/or resale. Therefore the lack of connectivity will be good for Linux and bad for the competition.
-sting3r
It also hired the Diablo Management Group to "oversee an orderly sale of the assets," according to two sources.
I don't know about you, but I'd never sell my assets to someone coming to me on behalf of Diablo...
but what about areas that were served by MediaOne, then bought by AT&T, and then bought by Comcast so that AT&T could stay within federal limits? Billing comes from Comcast, but support comes from AT&T. Am I the only one that is confused by this? This has to be Bert, he is the only one that could think of something as whacked out as this!
/me wonders how long all the smaller companies in the Net business will last at this rate...
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It seems that this is just another case of the "small" ISP not making it. The profitable ones get bought up, and the rest... well...
I've had great difficulty finding an independent ISP in Eugene, OR. The two best, pond.net and continet.com, have both been sold to EarthLink in the last 8 months. Qwest.net has gone MSN, except for Macintosh.
The following are all options, none of which are particularly linux-friendly: MSN, AOL, JUNO/NetZero, Earthlink. You can still get ppp by telling Qwest that you have a Macintosh... that's it; everybody else seems to have proprietary software. I think this is a big challenge for getting joe-user to try a linux desktop.
Are the days of the simple, no-strings-attached ppp account gone?
Imagine it! No more long pr0n downloads..just leave your laptop in your briefcase under the table for a few hours while you discuss 'business'. The pr0n is downloaded, you have a raise, what could be better?!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
...but it'll be coming from the mobile phone companies, like SprintPCS's "wireless web" and Voicestream (eventually AT&T too) with their GPRS. Doesn't look like unlimited service anymore, now pay by the minute or MB, at least for a while.
This happened to me twice in the past week. They know it's happening, and they seem to be taking their sweet time fixing it. If you don't muck around with your network card, release/renew, etc. you shouldn't run into any problems since it's only with the DHCP.
This is one time Linux dhcpcd is a bad thing- it's one of the few DHCP clients that actually plays by the rules, releasing your IP when you shutdown. Windows doesn't bother.
Overall ATT Broadband has their heads up their asses. They have managed to develop the WORST voice response system EVER. If you call the cable support number, they drag you through a huge menu, only to tell you to call another phone number. Another menu, a recorded woman who tells you about Nimda, how to reset your cable modem, then a recorded man who also tells you about Nimda, then a hold time ~20 mins. No wonder these companies are going under.. they couldn't manage a cable company, let alone an ISP.
Sorry to say, but the days of cheap bandwidth are over. To become profitable the vendors are gonna have to raise their rates. I, for one, would be happy to pay more to guarantee that the vendor would be there - 'cause if it's not, I am *hosed.*
I believe most of the functionality you mentioned has been "assimilated" into XP. :-)
Another point: linux distro CDs will cease to be readily available in the coming months. Stores are realizing that they are full of out-of-date stock of various distros that aren't selling. Don't believe me? Go to Staples/OfficeMax/GenericOfficeStore and look in their clearance section. It's sad.
So I think that the loss of broadband providers will have no positive impact on OSS.
Since a week ago or so my latencys have been huge. Pinging www.yahoo.com would get me times of 200-500 ms. Considering I playing online games a lot that just isn't acceptable! They get better early in the morning, I wonder if @home's network structure is suffering.
At least I now have time to finally finish Homeworld
don't ever take away my broadband connection. I don't know what I'd do. I have AT&T right now, and they have been pretty decent, back when they were MediaOne here in Cambridge, they sucked big hairy balls, but now the service is good, but expensive. I love it though, a linksys router there and the firewall it has, and then a wireless hub on top of that. I'm loving it, all with crazy fast downloads.
if that goes away, then I don't think I want to live.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Reading this over it makes no mention of Excite@home north of the 49th up here in Canada.
I had a friend who was supposed to get @home installed today so I wonder if it went through.
Any sources know how this affects Rogers and Cogeco?
If You Drink, Don't Park, Accidents Cause People.
guess everyone will have to use community wireless networks instead of paying your $19.95 to download email
I remember last week (maybe two weeks) there was a discussion here about somebody setting up his own neighborhood wireless network. Now, granted, he had access to a 10Mb connection and lots of equipment. But, alot of the discussion seemed here seemed to center on the feasibility of it. Maybe now we will start to see more community-oriented networks setup by private citizens? Any thoughts?
I have @home in Canada and have not heard anything about not taking new orders, I do know someone who had it installed last week in Toronto. Although the past 2 days my service has been rather crappy :( but this happens once in a while. One thing to consider is, I remember reading a few months ago about Canada having the highest % of broadband users, or something to that effect.
Snoozer.
On calling AT&T Cable Modem Customer Service - they could not tell what was wrong. They insisted that I call the Cable TV Service also owned by AT&T (logically, this was TCI cable, and they provide the infrastructure). They did not have a clue.
Ultimately, this home network was down all night, costing me $$$ for lost work, as well as much aggravation. I physically found where the problem was (less than 5 miles away) and on trying to report it got a snotty response as to when they might have it fixed. I should have crawled up there with some RG-6 and done a quick patch job. All they had was some shithead on the phone saying "we know there is a line down" and could not offer any estimated downtime.
More relevant, the Cable Modem agreement says nothing about having anything to do with cable TV (i.e.: you don't have to have a subscription to the TV service to get your damned internet!), so WhyTF are they telling me to call the TV people when it's their problem TOO???
Either way, I agree that these companies are clueless regarding service - and should never have been allowed to provide it. I'll be mad when I have to go back to dialup, but probably not as mad as I was yesterday.
db
Cig:
ôô
I've emailed Starbucks about availability of this service and they responded that they do not advertise it until all stuff is trained, but I am welcome to go to the store and try. I went, and it actually works very nice, thought little expensive.
Taking into account all expenses of running T1 into each of 500 stores, delaying service roll out could cost a lot. I guess it cost enough to run Mobile Star into financial problems.
> I won't be happy till the score is settled, 10 times over.
You're a meany.
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
Actually, "crimson tide" USS alabama SSBN-731, is an older Trident that carries the C-4 missle. The newer, more potent D5's are carried by the newer Trident subs based in Georgia (Alabama's homeport is in Wash state).
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I live near Excite@Home HQ. I await the furniture auction; they had good furniture.
Well my comcast isn't affect up here in michigan... I sjut made changes to my acocunt around 9pm and it was no trouble other then the normal no clue tier 1
>Any sources know how this affects Rogers and Cogeco?
It shouldn't affect them at all. AFAIK all of the cable internet providers here in Canada are not actually members of the @home network, they just make use some of the @home content for things like the default homepage they setup during installation on windows boxen. This is certainly the case for Shaw out west anyways, I don't know much about Cogeco, but I'm pretty sure Roger's is semi-independent of excite@home too.
Hrm.... that's really weird. In reply, in Ottawa, Canada, I have easily 30 different dialup ISPs, most of which are PPP, many of which also offer SLIP. As well, we have 5 different high speed options, two wireless, and ALL linux compatible... two PPPoE. And those are all home-user-targetted ISPs under $50 monthly. The stakes- and speed- go up if you're a business user.
:)
:)
I've got it goooooooood.
Oh, did I mention, you can usually get a static IP- all you have to do is ask for one.
Urban Detail
They have crapless craps at the Stratosphere Casino...unfortunatel they haven't figured out how to take the Rou out of Roulette.
My other sig is extremely clever...
COMCAST has a short voice mail on their support which says "Transmissions in the Ann Arbor area may be slower than expected. Comcast is aware of the problem" before it forwards us to AT&T Broadband, which says that they aren't in charge here and to call Comcast again. Calling the CATV support gets you a human. In fact, it gets you a human who won't give out any information and claims that he'll lose his job if he gives you any contact information for him or anybody else in the Comcast repair or support department. Poor phone slave! No respect for a company with these whiny whiny policies.
Cowardly Comcast not only won't fix it, but they won't even say what's up or answer their own damn phone. I reported them to the Ann Arbor Cable Commission and got a couple emails - Ms. Maria Holmes seems to be the one I should talk to, but she hasn't yet worked up a response except for a 2-line form response that says she will "Pass your request for information on". I might go to the Cable Commission meeting the fourth Tuesday of October, but that's a long time away! If any Comcast employees are out there, I double-dog dare you to tell me what has happened to the network and when it will be fixed. I'll even buy you lunch at Wendy's or Subway, which we can discuss the issues over.
My name is Morris Slutsky, my email is broken_form at yahoo. I would love to get together some sort of support group for Comcast, so write me if you are a Comcast victim and want to sign a petition or go see the Cable Commission with me.
(message number)
My other sig is extremely clever...
It will most likely be like back in the old days of "The Wave". You'll have a Shaw.ca or similar e-mail address, and your local content as opposed to the national Excite content.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Tomorrow's news now: I can't connect to microsoft.com. Did their domain crash? are they being DoS'ed? were they attacked by terrorists? It could be something big.
you can check them out at sonic.net
and the funny thing is that they just announced this service a few days ago. Now I just need a the right wireless card and I can post comments to slashdot during lunch =p
There are independant coffee houses in Seattle that offer free wireless access because they realize that customers might stop by and buy coffee and food whlie they use it, but they don't want to pay $30 a month for it, or a per-minute charge, since they are already spending money there. They go spend $50 a month on an ISP, $200 on their wireless router, and it's pretty much good.
I think where Starbucks failed was not adding wireless access, but thinking they would be able to charge a fortune for it instead of assuming they can make back the cost, and more, by the people that would stop by and have coffee while they use it that wouldn't stop by otherwise.
Write letter to your state Public Utility Commisions. Such rip-off artists like your bandwith provider should be severly punished. Soon everybody will go to jail thanks to Mr. Ashcroft.
I'm pretty sure Roger's is semi-independent of excite@home too.
To some extent, but not quite as arms-length as I'd prefer under the circumstances. Most Rogers services in Ontario are provided using Ontario-based servers. However, e-mail is still stored and handled by a server in San Francisco. I'm not entirely sure how integrated the on.home.com network is with the rest of @Home's stuff, but I do know that if Excite@Home kills the SF mail server, a lot of people in Ontario will be s-c-r-e-w-e-d.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
These guys just bought the remains of an Wireless ISP trough a bankruptcy proceeding in FL, for next to nothing. Geez at this rate it will be cheaper to buy an ISP than a new computer.
ITL.tv - Your Resource for financial news.
Could it have to do with that you couldn't get cable modems, even if the guy across the street could get it? just a thought.
ITL.tv - Your Resource for financial news.
I've know @home was dying ever since the Code Red viruses first struck. Up until that point, I was permitted the ability to run my own email and web servers. When the viruses were ravaging @home's bandwidth, they created a blanket port filter on 25 and 80 (email and web). Needless to say, this pissed me off.
When I called to complain, I was sent to an endless queue of representatives who couldn't care less about my problem. That was the last week I subscribed to @home.
I guess they had more important things on their minds, like not going bankrupt!
Many businesses are now failing, not because of bad technology or bad business models, but because of poor execution. Startups are particularly beholden to their early investors, and all of the VCs were heavily pushing "land grab" business practices throughout the bubble. The reason is obvious: Stocks were valued primarily on audience, and if you want the best quick return on your investment, you demand practices that build audience share, period. Early investors don't care about long term prospects for a business, they just want a quick cash-out to flip into something else. The 1997 changes in post IPO-lockout (from two years to six months) only magnified the short term focus. Having structured the business with that bias, the result is inevitable.
Businesses fail for all kinds of reasons, many of which are completely out of control of the management or techs. Don't dismiss an idea just because somebody screwed the pooch in the past.
...-.-
Here, where I am. New Westminster, BC (suburb of Vancouver) I have both ADSL (1.5mbps down/540kbps up) and cable (SHAW@HOME - 3mpbs down/540kbps up) and I've had both in varying areas of the city for well over a year (4 years in the case of cable). I hate to admit it, but, I've had excellent service in the whole time (2 days downtime in 4 years isn't bad), with the occassional hiccup here and there, nothing serious.
I pay $40 CDN for each service, thats about $26.00/month in US dollars. Neither of my providers (Shaw & Telus) is in trouble of going down, both are very linux friendly. No special software to run or anything. I run 2 servers with both static and dynamic IP addresses. The only thing is other than the cable company censoring (refusing to carry) certain newsgroups, I can't bitch. Those of you in the U.K., you have my sincerest sympathies. Here it's cheap and reliable. There are also a number of independent ISP's offering ADSL at the same price and service/speed levels. There were at least 4 others last time I checked about 6 months ago. Why all the problems south of the border?
Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity!
I'm a full-time telecommuter in Houston, with my main office in Dallas, both cities in MobileStar's Starbucks coverage area. I love getting out of the house, and with Ricochet gone, this was the best cheap alternative that let me work somewhere other than the house for a couple of days a week. I used the service yesterday, and I'm packing up my laptop again this morning to meet the Starbucks staff at the door at 5:30. They know me by name - I can't imagine a more perfect target user for this product. (Well, not that I'm perfect, but that too.)
I've signed up for MobileStar twice. The first time was an incredibly bad experience, so bad I started e-mailing their corporate staff by guessing their names (first initial, full last name @mobilestar.com). It worked, and I got a couple of suits to listen to my stories, and they even made some changes to their web site to reflect reality. They said it would work with any 802.11b card (but it didn't), they had router problems (couldn't pull up my Webtrends or other reports on 8000-9000 port range), the tech support staff would forget about your issue and not call you back. (On a side note, their tech support was extremely qualified, friendly, and easy to reach.)
What made me cancel was that it wasn't bulletproof reliable. They had a couple of days during my first month where I couldn't log on, and I had to call their customer service. In both cases, they couldn't fix the problem within a few minutes, and at that point, why should I bother to continue to burn my cell phone minutes, hanging around in Starbucks? I've got work to do, and faced with the prospect of either packing up my gear and going to another Starbucks (where the connection might not work) or going home to my DSL, I would just go home. You don't pay $30-$60 a month for that kind of reliability.
The access itself was awesome: I rarely saw anybody else in Starbucks using it, and so I had a full T1 to myself. My bosses loved it because I was always reachable, and I could do any diagnostic work remotely.
But again, the whole time I was using it, I only met two other people who used it. People just won't pay $30 a month to get wireless access in a coffee house, not when their home DSL or cable modem isn't much more than that. And one, two, or three users a month don't pay for a T1, at least not at those prices.
What's your damage, Heather?
Section 3.2 of the RFC:
Client-server interaction - reusing a previously allocated network address.
If the client receives neither a DHCPACK or a DHCPNAK message after employing the retransmission algorithm, the client MAY choose to use the previously allocated network address and configuration parameters for the remainder of the unexpired lease.
Basically, M$ is ok with re-using an unexpired Lease if Server does not respond. The problem is that M$ uses expired Leases all the time. Hence the collisions.
What do you use for a DHCP server that it goes belly up all the time?
My company offeres wireless locally at speeds up to T1, we have bandwidth control in place via QoS under linux to ensure customers don't use all our bandwidth for hosting and dial-up. We have IP accounting data from iptables and allow our customers to xfer up to 10GB for their initial $49/mo. They get all the speed they need but if they use the bandwidth then they'll have to pay for it. Every company that undersells bandwidth is going under, we are going strong.
The service is really provided by ATT broadband. excite is just a portal. AtHome provides some sort of caching technology. AtHome was supposed to provide mail server - but they did an absolutely awful job. AtHome was also supposed to provide part of the customer service, again absolutely awful job.
This is a little off topic, but I have always wondered how much geography plays into the ability to develop profitable wireless WAN. In the west, many cities have a huge mountain on one or both sides of the city (Denver, Phoenix, ALbuquerque, etc...). Would it be easier to design a network in these cities since line of sight would be pretty much guaranteed anywhere in the city.
I just ordered service on 10/10/01 (MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY) They are even offering 2 months free - that's right free until 2002!! And the self-installation kit is free as well!
I have had problems with comcast service though, like 200ms ping times to my gateway. I blame it on the partment complex density though. I'm moving to a house in a near by neighborhood, and we'll see how that goes...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
They bought just short of the release cycle and bought too much... Seems Wal-Mart's been handling it pretty much correctly- 5 of the latest copies of Mandrake at any store at any time; when they run out they know via their inventory system how fast they ran out so they can plan restock in an orderly manner and make sure they don't have much in the way of stale overstock and don't run too short for too long.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
BT seems to be charging in the same general ballpark for ADSL and ISP service that Verizon's charging for things here in Dallas, TX. It's a little more expensive (I'm getting 764k down and 128k up from them for about the same US dollars value...) but it's not enough to really count it as being that much more.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
They (@Home) don't really want you to run servers. In the past, they didn't really try to stop anyone, but in response to Code Red, they blocked incoming port 80 (but only in certain areas, e.g. not in my area.) According to their rules, this wouldn't deny anyone any functionality they can rightfully claim. You weren't really supposed to be running web and mail servers in the first place, so maybe it was inevitable that they would prevent you from doing so. And were you trying to get your service canclelled by complaining about the problem? Sheesh...
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
While it would have been nice, a T1 wasn't strictly needed. A fat ADSL pipe (1.5mbit down 764k up) would have handled them nicely (and much more cheaply when it could be obtained). Most people wouldn't need the bidirectional bandwidth that a T1 provides.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Amazingly, it seems standards-based free wireless access is spreading in independent cafes, if this article is to be believed. Anyone in the bay area try this?
Amazing that Macintosh is now synonymous with standards-based.
Lies about crimes
Are you sure it was @Home and not you local cable company in charge of the blocking? I've never had any problems with Insite@Home and I keep an open VNC on SSH on HTTP connection open to my home about 12 hours per day.
Joe
At first, I was not able to comprehend how Excite@home could be losing money when so many people were marching to broadband - unless they were running an Amazon.com-lose-money-on-every-transaction-and-mak e-it-up-in-volume business model. It remained a mystery until I found out that the only thing they do is provide all that useless crap "if you miss AOL, you will like this" content, and something about help(less)desk.
I certainly never cared for the former, and the latter is so bad that I would have to spend 30 minutes on the phone proving I had a clue and the problem was on their end before they would bother to look and see if the problem was on their end (it always was when I called because I knew enough to troubleshoot my own network first)
The most annoying thing about Excite is that I originally signed up under MediaOne RoadRunner - the Terms Of Service were great! I could run any server/OS I wanted to as long as I wasn't reselling their service or causing configuration/security problems. I had a good firewall and I ran an NT4 server with IIS, MS SQL server, and Cold Fusion for development purposes for over a year - never a problem. Once they switched to Excite, the TOS says I can't run any of that, soI shut down outside access to those services.
The Digital Sorceress
I was wondering the same thing when my Adelphia@home service went down for the better part of 24 hours over last weekend.
:-/
Needless to say, Excite@home has some infrastructure problems, but I think they inherited a lot of them. A couple of months ago our service bit the dust for nearly a week, and after the second day the tech support guys were allowed to explain to all the pissed off customers (like me) what was causing the problem.
Adelphia purchased TCI cable a couple of years ago here in the San Fernando Valley. Apparently they never bothered to inspect any of the switching equipment after the acquisition, and TCI had seriously overloaded some of the switches with more connections than was safe for optimal/sustained performance... kind of like a tangled octopus of extension cords plugged into a wall socket.
Anyway, the only people who had known this was going on were the old TCI people, who had either left or continued to report everything was hunky dory, right up until one of the switches blew up.
Multiply that one incident at one cable company by all of them, and it's no wonder they're in trouble.
Without going into specifics I can tell you that I have first hand knowledge of how this effects Cogeco and Rogers. In a nut shell Rogers and Cogeco are no different than the US cable companies. They get nntp, smtp, pop and web services from @Home. No @Home no service. I know for a fact that Cogeco has been informed by @Home that it's no longer accepting new customers. However both companies have a very big push on the way to develop a new services infrastructure for their customers. Cogeco is not far away from announcing their plans. Some cable companies have also received notice that @Home wants to cancel their agreement. Obviously this is bad for existing customers.
If I was a Cogeco customer I would be too concerned. If I was a Rogers customer, which I am, I would be a little concerned.
ta!
* a direct optical connection on the side of your home, which is
* Ethernet standards based, and
* Operates at 10MBps bidirectionally, with
* No shared bandwidth, so
* Buy our stuff, if
* You live in Sacramento, by checking out:
* www.winfirst.com and maybe, just maybe
* Your life will stop sucking.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
I've ordered Qwest DSL with MSN :( since there's
no other choices at this time. Will this not work with Linux? Surely it uses PPPoE or DHCP, right?
I turned around a C-7243 with boxsox trailers and a reversed pytho when I was on the 'zorg. It's kinda funny, because when we ported at TT-0600, someone noticed the crown was denorfed!
I don't get it. Demand for broadband is high. If the carriers are operating at a loss, why aren't they adjusting their rates?
Can somebody point me to an article that explains this?
Oh that's just SPLENDID.
I currently live in the Philadelphia area. A short while ago Comcast took over the existing Adelphia cable system. I have a 1-Way surfboard cable modem (telephone upstream, cable downstream.) Adelphia promised for the last 2 years they'd upgrade the infrastructure to support 2 way.
When Adelphia turned over the area to Comcast, it still maintained the cable modem network. So I still actually pay Adelphia for my cable modem, but my cable company is comcast. Comcast sent a letter out sometime in early August saying come September 22th, existing 1-way cable customers could schedule migration to 2-way. The date came and went, and I received no call from the cable company as promised.
Two days ago, I phone Comcast@Home to see what was up. Their reps are CLUELESS. The conversation went something like this:
"Ok, so you sent me this letter saying you'd have 2-way cable ready last month. So now you're telling me it's not ready?"
"Sir, your area is currently not servicable for 2-way."
"Then you guys just sent me this letter for the fun of it? Inventing dates off the top of your head? This couldn't have anything to do with the fact @Home is in bankruptcy now could it? Are you even installing new modems?"
"Yes we are."
"So when's my area going to be ready?"
"I don't know."
Argh!
I live approx 19,000 feet from my CO which makes me ineligble for DSL. I'm stuck with this crappy SB1000 modem for which the service is INCREDIBLY flaky. Both cable companies play "pass the blame" whenever I have service problems.
Besides DirecPC Satellite Service (and oh, the nightmare stories I've read about them) are there any other alternative high-bandwith solutions I should be aware of?
Nice try, troll. According to my source, the crimson tide was actually ISBN 0817310517.
I contracted to a company who configured and installed the "kits" (router, switch, access points, UPS, etc) into the Starbucks' stores. The problem was inverse-pyramidal management with far too many layers of outsourcing.
I think the chain of outsourcing went something like this:
Starbucks contracted with
Compaq, who contracted with
MobileStar, who contracted with
NEC and IBM, who contracted with
Netcom (not the ISP), who contracted with
my company.
The management was FAR too top heavy and inefficient. The actual bottleneck was up the line a bit; Netcom did everything it could to make sure kits got out the door on time and installed under Draconian schedules. There was a schedule originally planned, but the folks up the chain couldn't get configurations and equipment to Netcom on time to meet it, and then (I believe) tried to put the blame on Netcom for not meeting deadlines.
Typical (mis)management.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
I have Excite@home. The speed is great. All the extra fluff (read content) sucks. I don't want to know the news as delivered by them. I don't need yet another email address. What I do need is a fast connection. And that is what I got. To my surprise I discovered that you do not have to install all the additional stuff to have access to the @home network. If you have the modem you can connect. My, no more fluff.
ADSL or cable is the same price (if you own the modem).
I have Telus ADSL and download at 150KB/s for CDN$30 per month.That's about $20 US.
I live in a brand new subdivision that basically has no hope of getting any kind of dsl/cable broadband any time soon (God bless Qwaste and the Deathstar).
Then a neighbor told me about a small isp (Mesa Networks) that was offering fixed 802.11b connections for residential service in my area with 1-mbps up/down for $58/month. I called them up, arranged an installation time for a week later and have been up and running with no problems for a few weeks now.
Since then, it occurred to me that small shops like these offering fixed wireless access are a perfect compromise between the bloated-beauracracy-from-hell providers (ie here, here and here) and the unreliable, unmanaged, unavailable you-get-what-you-pay-for communal neighborhood nets that have been spawned as a backlash. It's become obvious that turning a profit offering broadband where last mile wiring is involved is extremely difficult if not impossible. But, the infrastructure to manage fized wireless seems a lot more manageable from a small business perspective to me
Anyway, I don't have the time, inclination or expertise to professionally manage an isp network and I really hope that the model these guys are pursuing pays off - I think small local providers have a much better chance of tailoring solutions that can cost effectively meet the broadband needs of neighborhoods and communities.
HERE is a story about WINfirst.. they just fired up the first customer a few weeks ago.
Still don't know if they'lllet you run servers, tho..
Look at the Dreamcast. Superior technology, inferior marketing, early EOL.
Wow, I never thought I'd defend the Marketing Department *ducks*
@Home is only stopping adding new customers so that they can hand the respective customer provisioning databases to the cable companies. Can't hand off the DB's clean if you are still adding new customers. It is very important to separate Excite from @Home. @Home handles and maintains the mail servers, provisioning databases, News servers, proxy servers, backbone, core, and peering routers. Excite well they are the mind boggling useless money pit who absorbed all of funds that should have been set aside for Server, backbone, and circuit upgrades. C'mon George Bell lets spend another billion dollars for a greeting card company instead of a cable modem infrastructure that the MSO partners shook their head at! Oh yeah wait until the cable companies take over news and webspace and the like. The cable companies will quickly wish they could get someone to handle it all for only 25% of the customer take. People are going to suffer when the cable companies take over.
Mobilstar was just a lousy deal. I had no idea they were in financial trouble, so I actually considered signing up last week. I decided not to, because they want a year contract and $29.95/month for local-only service, only in Starbucks. You can't work from Starbucks, so this isn't really a serious service - it's a luxury item. Which is all very well and good - I would have bought it anyway - but it was just too expensive for the sort of person who would want wireless - a person who travels. They wanted $0.15/minute in addition to the $29.95/month if you wanted to use their service out of the area.
When will people learn that metered internet service is a non-starter, and that you need to provide a service that is priced attractively if you want customers? If they'd charged $29.95/month for access anywhere they had connectivity, they most likely would have generated a lot more income. Sigh.