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@Home Network Approaching Shutdown
David Harris writes: "A bankruptcy court ruled today that the @Home network will be shutdown at midnight, unless the company reaches new deals with its cable partners and creditors. The decision is a victory for bondholders, owed $750 million by Excite@Home, whose motion asked the court to shutdown the network on grounds that AT&T's $307 million offer to acquire @Home's broadband network is not adequate and fair value for the network could only be found if a shutdown was forced." Read about it on excite.com, while you can. CNet has a good analysis of where things stand. 45% of the cable modem users in North America! Ouch.
If they were a little more reasonable about their terms of service, they could have charged a little more. I would gladly have paid a small fee for the opportunity to run my own web server, or to talk to tech support people who didn't think my problems were due to not running windows. I moved to speakeasy because I wanted a more freedom about what to do with my computers and didn't want to be treated like a clueless luser by people who naturally assume that if it is not windows, it is broken
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Um, no. Just because it's on excite.com, doesn't make it official. It's actually an AP (Associated Press) newswire story that just about every news web site carries. It just so happens that Excite has a news web site (news.excite.com) that carried the story. It is exactly the same as when the cable television station MSNBC does a story on Microsoft. It's not an official statement from Microsoft, it's just a news organization reporting on a company, that, by coincidence, happens to be its parent company.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Here is the info page for Comcast@home users
http://www.comcastonline.com/info.htm
No Sig
I work in the digital loop carrier industry, and the technology exists to extend DSL broadband to people outside of the normal DSL range of a mile or so from the phone company's Central Office. The company I work for makes a box that allows phone companies to send all their voice and data over fiber (or copper, or wireless) to a remote terminal, and then it's from THAT point that the 1 mile limitation kicks in.
The problem for John Q. Dialup is that the phone companies are just too big and slow to put this technology out in the field. Our stuff is just now going through testing in SBC, but how long it will be before a large number of people can live 10 miles from the Central Office and still get DSL is anybody's guess.
Right now, many of the people with the best broadband opportunities are actually rural customers! This technology I'm talking about is pretty attractive to smaller Mom & Pop phone companies because due to the low initial cost of this particular product.
I got lucky: my aparment complex just happens to fall into one of SBC Ameritech's DSL sweet spots. I think when I get around to getting a house, I'm going to be looking very closely at the DSL availability!
I just read the article on news.com which discusses this ruling but it seemed to make clear two things:
1) that the parties must go back to the bargaining table
2) that the service being disconnected was unlikely
What it sounds like happened is that the judge said they can cut the contracts but there is nothing right now saying affirmatively that the service will be shut off. Basically this just means it is legal for excite to cancel the existing contracts so that they can re-negotiate them.
So I don't think excite is out yet...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Will I experience any interruptions with my AT&T Broadband high-speed cable Internet service?
Your AT&T Broadband high-speed cable Internet service connectivity, e-mail and Personal Web pages will not be affected by Excite@Home's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. However, your home.excite.com home page may become temporarily unavailable.
What will happen to my high-speed cable Internet service if AT&T Broadband's proposal to purchase the Excite@Home network is not approved?
If the proposal to purchase the Excite@Home network is not approved, your home page content may be temporarily unavailable, but you will still have access to your e-mail and the Internet.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Certainly they are not taking in the entire $39.95 each month. The local provider (Cox Cable in my town) obviously takes a portion of that montly bill, but Excite! must still be receiving a ton of money each month.
Nah - they only get about $15 of that $40. The rest stays with the cable company (who is greedly eyeing that $15 for themselves, or selling your ass to Microsoft or AOL for some change).
Furthermore, they have to take all of the customer service calls, which is why they are screwed. They never thought there would be so many slashdotters rubbing their minimum wage idiots' noses into the existence of their NetBSD on Mac IIcx Firewalls. Of course, they wouldn't have had such support costs if their network was better run (but again that's probably because they were undercapitalized by the cable companies who created them, umm, not to mention their dotcrap buying spree).
Those of you who are being cut off will be lucky if you pick up 'just a pipe' service. This could be the big Interactive TV Convergance shakedown that the cablecos have wanted from day 1.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The rest of the money is probably spent on their internal data lines connecting POPs, devaluation of hardware, facilities costs, insurance, support /administrative /billing /sales staff wages and benefits, etc. It could add up to quite a bit.
Devaluation of equipment? Are you serious?
I do the network admin / deployment at a small (1600 user) ISP. We run around like crazy looking for "ancient" AS5200s because they just plain work. We get 47 lines out of each one (bastards made us use PRIs instead of DEAs so now we "retaliated" by asking for NFAS) and once configured, they just work.
I can't imagine cable being much different: You have your super-expensive head-end for each trunk, and once it is configured, you leave it be. Keep some parts around or, if you've got the cash, a hot spare and your equipment doesn't change. It doesn't devaluate in the sense that it wears out. Your bandwidth costs will be through the roof, yes, but that's what the economy of volume does for you. You have a 30MBit pipe for each trunk, a killer web cache and maybe 155MBit upstream. (I'm guessing here: Bell Canada's HSE (DSL) internet bandwidth overcommit rates being > 100:1, cable's can't be that far off)
The point is that yes the equipment is expensive and the bandwidth is expensive. But the equipment doesn't wear out. I'm sure you can get some pretty sweet deals on bandwidth when you tell your provider that you want enough feeds to service a nation. It had to have been mismanaged. This kind of story isn't new; this particular one just happens to have hit a hell of a lot of people at once.
Capacity for 5 million, while servicing only 10% of that is not a good business plan.
Not necessarily.
Suppose (hypothetically):
Your network will support 5,000,000 subscribers,
Your non-recurring costs are $1/subscriber-month,
Your per-subscriber costs are $10/subscriber-month, and
You charge $50/subscriber-month.
This:
Breaks even at 125,000 subscribers,
Makes $195,000,000/month ($2.3 Billion/yr) at 5,000,000 subscribers, and
Breaks down at 5,000,001 subscribers.
Of course that's not what they did. Nevertheless, they were up to 73.4% of the design capacity of the network by 7/11. So (unless their business model didn't include making a profit until their capacity was saturated) I don't think lack of customers was the problem.
With no data but that timeline I'd wonder if they underestimated their per-user recurring costs (such as support) or their network capacity (which maps back into per-user recurring costs through extra support when they saturate and the connections start to degrade).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
When I said "non-recurring costs" I meant "recurring fixed overhead" (i.e. recurring costs that are not per-user).
Sorry 'bout that.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You lose your IP address for one. Most of the IP's were rented by @home. In many cases you also lose your bandwidth beyond the gateway, @home leased the circuits. That's no the same for all markets, hope it works out for you.
Carpe Deez
AT&T's support lines are swamped, even though it's the middle of the night. I managed to get through on chat much more quickly than the support number. (Though the person I spoke with on the phone was much friendlier than the one in chat...)
;-)
Here's what I found out:
+ The chat person said flat-out that AT&T does not support static IPs and that I was basically hosed. She referred me to the Win32 "configurator" executable on the http://newuser.attbi.com website. I didn't bother asking for a linux version.
+ The phone person said that since everything was so new that they didn't have their act together for static IPs yet and to run dynamic for a couple weeks until things settle down.
Either way, I'm stuck on DHCP for a while, but the phone support seemed to imply there was some light at the end of the tunnel once the initial rush of problems are sorted out. For me, this is only an issue for remote access since my internal network is all NATted anyhow.
My guess is that the Excite --> AT&T transition would be completely transparent to those on DHCP who renew their leases after midnight.
And of course, if they try to force me to stay on DHCP, there's always DSL...
I am a Comcast@home subscriber in the Metro Detroit area and had unresponsive DNS this morning but they're responding now.
Speak truth to power.
Bonds are also investments, but are very different from stocks.
Bonds are an obligation to pay. They are like a credit card with a very high credit limit. If you got a credit card and bought a spiffy Apple Cinema Display with it, you have to pay the money back, but the people who loaned you the money aren't going to get more money if the Cinema Display doubles your productivity.
If you can't pay back the debt, you either renegotiate it - just like a credit card - or go into bankruptcy. If you go into bankruptcy, you probably have to give up your spiffy Cinema Display.
If you issued the bonds to make investments like Blue Mountain Arts, worth nearly a billion at the height of the boom, and then sell it for $30 million, the bond holders (credit card company) get nothing.
But if the business you've built up has value, as Excite@Home does, you can sell the business and pay back the bonds.
The heart of this issue is that AT&T is trying to buy Excite@Home for a bit under 50c on the dollar. Understandably, the bondholders want to sell it for more like 90c so they can get most of their money back. So they are insisting on shutting down the network, because then they will no longer be losing $6 million a month, and they want to convince AT&T to pay more for the assets.
Of course if they actually do shut down, Excite@Home is worth LESS, not more, and AT&T will probably wind up paying LESS for the assets, if it even wants them anymore.
In short, the bondholders' gambit looks like it's failing, and they will wind up getting about 10c on the dollar instead of 50c.
Hope this has been informative.
D