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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.
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
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
That is correct. I keep an Earthlink account for traveling. No problems connecting with Linux - it's just plain old PPP. Their Windows software is just a dialer that knows all the local access numbers, and there are plenty of other ways to get those. I just keep the current list in my Palm.
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.
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.
F.Y.I. There is no requirement in the RFC for a client to release the IP address.
MacOS 9 and before will release the lease upon shutdown and there is nothing more annoying then 50 angry mac users screaming at you at 8:30AM because the DHCP server went ass-up the night before and none of them have IP addresses.
FROM: http://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2131.txt"...where the client retains its network address locally, the client will not normally relinquish its lease during a graceful shutdown. Only in the case where the client explicitly needs to relinquish its lease, e.g., the client is about to be moved to a different subnet, will the client send a DHCPRELEASE message."
Looks like everything is still better value in the Americas...
Over here in the UK it's going to cost me £40 (that's about $55) per month to get NTL Cable, with 512k down & 128k up. That's the only broadband option -- ADSL is being completely mismanaged by BT.
But then again, from the sounds of it, the people over here could actually have the right idea about pricing -- at least they're not all going out of business.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Not particularly close. Excite@Home may have sucked (especially the Excite portion) but they actually did handle most of the infrastructure and had their own backbone. Of course with AT&T slurping down any parts of the company that look tasty to it that's changing rapidly, but @Home used to do the router-herding etc. to make the system work. The really stupid part of all this is that the @Home portion was still doing okay financially - Excite managed to lose so much money it dragged the rest down with it. Not a broadband failure at all, just another BS "Portal" biting the big Kishko.
My sources? A former @Home Tier-4 Network engineer and a few people who worked in the NOC. No bones to pick there...
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!
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.
What else could have been done?
@Home managed a patchwork network with 1.35 million customers. There's no way they could have quickly rolled out a response to Code Red on the scale required. As it was parts of their network were beginning to saturate before the block was put in place and with much of the activity now dampened they've removed the block.
No, while @Home did a terrible job at informing it's customers and training it's own staff they did finally get the response right - heck, they really didn't have any alternatives. Just blocking the ports and getting their network traffic back under control was clearly what needed to be done and the first step for any possible response strategy.
As to support most @Home customers won't trust them to get the date right; the Dilbert cartoon about letting cable-modem support monkeys reel through their script while waiting for the point a human intellect kicks in was so @Home!
By the way the @Home pages on Code Red still just say "patch your server." No mention it's been sitting on the 'net for who knows how long beaconing out it's lack of security to everyone and is now likely thoroughly pilfered and riddled with trojan horses, new accounts, turned into a zombie. Wonder what the legal liability is for bad advice like that?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
This arrangement, with @Home controlling the IP service, made some degree of sense when it was originally set up. Much of the friction between @Home and its cable-television shareholders (AT&T Broadband, Comcast, Cox, etc) that has been reported recently is due to the cables wanting to provide services to IP devices other than PCs, and @Home dragging their feet about supporting them.
Happenned to me two days ago. I had to find out just how fucking awful the tech support is. The support person couldn't even create a ticket because their own trouble ticket system was down. What a fucking joke! Their 24.11.49.1 gateway is down (my subnet). I fixed the problem myself. How to fix? Turn DHCP off, since it won't work anyway. Set the netmask to 255.0.0.0 and set your default route to some other gateway e.g. 24.11.50.1. Try it, it worked for me.
Type in 'www' in your URL bar.
Log in with your user name and password.
See this web page, it is a very configurable portal and you can edit your email addresses, change your passwords, upload files to your homepage. And all of this works in Windows, Mac, and Linux. No special software is required, just a standards supporting webbrowser.
It may be my ignorance, but I don't know any other ISP that provides that kind of crossplatform solution.
@home also does your email 'mail' and nntp 'news'. And the nntp has good lists, even an @home unix list.
I am not saying that excite@home does not suck, but they do actually do something.