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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.
I do feel bad because I have a lot of friends who don't have land-based phone lines anymore. They switched to cable for the computer and cell phones for phone use. If their service lapses, they're going to be SOL.
I don't see any reason why Excite won't kill the service tonight. They've got nothing to lose, since they're already bankrupt. Shutting off service just stems the bleeding. The other companies are going to get hurt by this, and it's going to put high-speed internet access in a bad light.
But, I guess this is what happens when one company controls the lion's share of internet access. Back in the day of local ISP's, one of them going under wasn't the end of the world. Can you imagine what would happen if AOL or MSN turned off their service? (and yes, I'm bloody well expecting a smartaleck response there).
I'm just glad I never got rid of my dial up access. I have the feeling my friends are going to be coming over to get their net fix during the outage.
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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.
Moreover, they have a monopoly. In my neighborhood I don't have a choice between Cox and Roadrunner. It's either Cox@Home or a phone modem (we're too far away from the CO for DSL). So they can't be losing customers since there's no compitition. And even if their competition is DSL then their competitors are going out of business as well (whatever happened to Covad?)
Sombody's got to be taking some money home with them at night.
Well, it's definitely a bad move for the consumer, but it's pretty clear that the consumer hasn't been an especially high priority in the broadband industry for a while now. It's fairly telling when the cable companies are the customer service leaders.
I think occasional massive hiccups like this (and the Northpoint DSL debacle that preceded it) are part of the price of an unregulated industry. We'd see this same kind of brinksmanship and the same sort of politically or financially motivated service outages from our telephone service providers were it not for regulations mandating a scheme of interconnection and settlement fees. But does anyone really want that same sort of regulatory scheme for broadband? I might change my mind later, but it seems like the occasional outage like this one might be the lesser of two pretty big evils.
Seems to me the bondholders are the ones playing chicken. I don't get it: "The network is worth more than you're offering. Pay us more or at midnight the network goes down!" "OK, fine, shut it down; then the network will be worth zero." Seems to me the bondholders made a bad investment and are trying to get their money back. That's the risk they took; they should be big boys and take their lumps, like everyone else who lost on the .com bubble burst. 30 cents on the dollar is better than nothing.
Funny how not too long ago the cable companies said they couldn't possibly allow competition, that @Home was the only game allowed. Too bad they didn't listen to us customers and allow us to choose our own ISP.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
DSL - tried to get it a year ago, and I'm just a bit too far away from the CO to get service. It will probably take 3 visits and 3 mornings off of work to verify that I can't get DSL - and even then, I'll never have official word, just the hearsay from a disgruntled tech.
802.11b wireless - Several providers? What part of the country is that again? Here in my corner of the midwest, there are a few less options.
Satellite - "Games are wasteful of valuable bandwidthm especially given the current shortage". Guess us gamers should go the e-ghetto where we belong...
T1 - This would be a great option if a) I had the expertise to set this up in a timely manner b) I had the capital to pay for the initial equipment c) I knew ANY neighbors in a mile radius that would pay for a connection and the 802.11b equipment. Sorry, it's not really viable right now.
Dialup. See Satellite.
Sorry. I got a cable modem because I like an always on connection, and I really enjoy online games. I kept it because it really enhances the online gaming experience, even on my (comparatively) slow machine, and it helps facilitate my new linux habit (45 minutes to download an ISO image from a public server).
But hey, thanks for making me feel like an idiot for going for the fast, easy, cheap option and not investigating the other lame-ass offers in town.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"