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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.
And probably last post since I'm an @home subscriber. My e-mail is already toast!
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
I won't be able to read Slashdot tommorow!
*goes and collapses on the floor*
Wouldn't shutting down the service be a bad move for both sides? The bond holders would be left with what could be scavenged out of a sale of the company while the cable companies are left with a lot of unhappy customers. I think at minimum a short term deal will be struck so that they can continue to negotiate.
Someone grab a screen shot for the dot-bomb museum, please.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
starts looking in the back side of computer boxes to figure our which one has the modem installed
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Time to starting looking for a new provider.
--locust
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.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
I'm a bit confused... if you signed up through AT&T for @Home access, does that mean you're losing your service with excite's expiration? My parents have AT&T@Home service, and I'm worried that this'll stop the flow of virally infected email that lets me know my Dad's still alive.
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
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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
Time for a Congressional bailout.
P.S. It's for the children...
That is all.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I got news for those fuckers. A 300 baud modem is a faster speed than ZERO....
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