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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.
Someone grab a screen shot for the dot-bomb museum, please.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Time to starting looking for a new provider.
--locust
I dont see how shutting something down is a victory for anyone. So they owe 750 million bucks. When they stop getting 45% of the cable modem users ~$50 a month, they are still gonna be 750 million in debt, with no income. I dont understand. Of course, IANAA (i am not an accountant)
Don't Tread on Me
We have 4 million users .. if each one sent me $100, we'd have more than AT&T's bid. And for $250, we'd have a billion, which not only covers @home's debt, but is likely WAY more than AT&T wants to spend.
Would you pay $250 for a share of your own cablenet company?
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
It's extortion. AT&T made an offer to buy the network from excite@home and the bond holders didn't think that it was high enough. They think that AT&T or some other entity who has an interest in having the network operational will make a better offer when they are under a more real threat of having the network turned off.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
The problem with the residential broadband market is that it relies on users not using much of the bandwidth available to them. But the people that most flock to broadband connections are those that want bandwidth.
I'm fighting with Cox Road Runner (Fairfax, VA) about policy changes. Although not currently prohibited, it appears that they are trying to pressure residential users that run their own (passworded) FTP servers, Telnet servers, mail, and web servers into buying Cox Business Internet services. One problem: My 1.5mbps download pipe costs $250 on business vs. $40 on residential. Odd too, how they are only discussing these server limitations now that they have a high-priced "business service" to offer.
Road Runner, @home, and other cable modem services need to start pricing more realistically. If someone wants just "basic" service for e-mail and web pages, then give them 512K PPPOE so that they can't run servers. And charge them $40 a month for it. If someone wants to run servers for personal use or needs a bit more bandwidth to dowload Linux and *BSD ISO images, give them 1.5MB, 1 static IP and charge them $90. But don't try to make residential users pay for business class services that cost as much as a car payment! People just won't make the jump from $40 to $250 -- unless they really are running businesses.
I understand that they haven't been making money but how do they go for so long without adjusting their plan to make money? Wouldn't they have seen a while back that they are going down the tube?
There are two ways to make a business profitable. Reduce costs or increase income.
I would have thought that a cable service could increase it's monthly charges and still made money. They would have lost some customers to DSL but a lot of customers don't have any other choice. If it takes $60/month/user to make money then that's what has to be charged.
So let's see... As far as broadband goes, we've lost Northpoint, Rhythms, Covad just filed chapter 11. AT&T and Excite(Cox?) just filed chapter 11.
Who is left?
SWBell is my local phone company and they have DSL. Surprise that all their competitors went out of business considering SWBell was providing the lines.
I think we either need to make a concious decision:
A. We don't want to let the phone company sell DSL, and we don't want the Cable company to provide cable access only provide the lines so other companies can resell.
B. We want the phone and cable companies to be the sole providers of the service and the line. We want it to be government regulated to keep us from getting screwed and to set prices.
Personally, I vote for A.
What is everyone else's toughts?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
It's not just that the "bond holders didn't think it was high enough" ...It really *is* extortion -- what you're not hearing on the gnus is that AT&T is the largest shareholder of @Home and they certainly had a lot to gain by lowballing their bid. AT&T is on both sides and is trying to get itself a sweetheart deal.
I don't blame the bondholders for being upset!
BTW -- I'm not biased, I have @Home via Comcast and will likely get shut off if they don't come to an agreement.
On a clear disk you can seek forever
The whole idea of having one big (monopoly) company provide the infrastructure, and another the actual service, has failed utterly in the case of broadband. In DSL, the infrastructure guys strangled the service companies because they were in fact competitors. In cable modems, the unregulated growth & consolidation of the service carriers, along with the monopoly status of the 'customer' networks, caused the one big player to eventually fold.
Notice that the individual cable-system owned broadband programs are still going strong (well, ok, still going). That's because the company that controls the market gets a direct benefit from helping those programs make money. In contrast, even the companies that had a stake in the @home service still saw it a joint venture --with potential rivals. Whether or not it made money didn't matter to them, and since they're all local monopolies, they had no incentive to even pay @home on time (who else were they going to 'sell' to?).
Seriously ... why don't we buy it? Is it because there are too many factions of geeks (seperated by OS, creed, nationality, spirituality, etc.)in the world today? Have the geeks simply lost the true revolutionary spirit? Is this the chance for [sic] world domination [/sic] that we've all joked about for years?
/., what is wrong with this idea (besides assuming a volunteer-based and community-based ISP will flop)? They said it couldn't be done with operating systems ... and it happened. What about ISPs? Would this be the biggest waste of money in the history of the world (or the largest pyramid scheme ever) ... or could this be history in the making?
... because right now it'd rock if someone we could all trust (someone who isn't all about money to begin with) would set up a PayPal account for this very purpose and start rounding up heavyweight geeks to form the board. Rally the troops! Let's start buying up dead ISPs and turn the Internet back over to the people! Damn the man!
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Inquiring minds want to know
Even superheroes once were losers
I did a quick search of the Excite web site. That same month, they promised to donate up to $3 million to a Meg Ryan-sponsered charity.
They had a revenue of $113 million for that quarter.
The 1999 news site has a ton of stuff like this. The 2000 site seems to have as much, but the last announcement is in May, 2000.
Does that shed some light on where the money went? Just another company, thinking they would keep getting exponential growth, making money out of nothing, with no provisions for an economic downturn.
I'll miss being a LPB on Counterstrike.
According to the articles, @home has 4.1 million cable modem users.
All of this is because ATT is in a hugely powerful position and took advantage of it. 300mil for Excite is a joke when you consider what their contracts are worth - or even when you look at their burn rate 6mil/week. This company is worth a helluva lot more. ATT is just a cash-rich robber-baron who has come in to reap the spoils of Excite's bad fortunes.
It is because of providers like ATT that Excite is in this position to begin with. Of your $45/mo bill, Excite only sees $16 - and they are the ones providing the damn service.
Maybe by shutting down, Excite will put ATT where they belong.
@Home never blocked ports 80/25. (I have Comcast@Home, and those ports never stopped working. A co-worker has ATT@Home, and they still work for him too)
In other words, it was Cox that blocked your ports, and I betcha they will be blocked with Cox after they are on thier own network.
In other words, you ain't gainin' nuttin'...
--knick
Actually, I have a bit of information regarding the @home shutdown. I work for a regional ISP that has business relations with Cox Communications.
Cox has told us that this could potentially lead to chaos on the internet, not only because @home is a major cable internet provider, but also because they have one of the more large national backbones on the internet. However, Cox customers may not have to worry because they have been provisioning the use of other backbones so that their customers would have minimal downtime.
In the end, this may affect a large portion of internet services such as DNS and email. Inappropriate routes may still exist that relay through the @home network, even after the network is shutdown
My employer uses Cox for fibre T1's so we have been advised that such services may not work properly, until this situation is resolved. But for most end-users the result may be serious lag times until certain services get re-routed through other backbones.
r00tdenied
Platinum Networks Hosting www.platinum-networks.com
One of the stories I read about this, said that @Home gets $16 dollars/month out of the total monthly fee. For me, this fee is $45.95 + taxes for a grand total of $50.30/month. AFAIC, this is a very reasonable rate, considering the performance I get (up to 460 KB/sec), but it's clear that @Home was getting only a small portion of my monthly payment. Supposedly @Home was trying to renegotiate these customer charges to be as high as $50/month. I think I would seriously reconsider my subscription at that point.
Meanwhile, I'm hoping that they don't pull the plug on me tonight. :-/
Inside sources say this. All AT&T customers will not experience a loss in service, it is business as usual. Negotiaations are taking place as we speak and Excite @Home has said they will not pull the plug until negotiations are complete. AT&T users can expect negotiations to end sometime on Sunday. If no resolution is reached as of Sunday there will be a loss of service until December 15th. AT&T will migrate existing subs begining Dec. 9 through the 15th to the AT&T network currently run under WorldNet. Your email will change from home.com to attbi.com ( Broadband Internet ).
Get all your posting in before Sunday night!!!
Deep Throat