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Some People @Home, Some Not @Home

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hey-brother-can-you-spare-a-dialup dept.

11thangel writes: "Dotcomscoop is reporting that Excite@home has released a statement saying that they have discontinued service to AT&T, as it's certain negotiations will be fruitless. All others are still at the bargaining table. Earlier statements indicated that an example would be made out of one provider, AT&T being the obvious target. Everyone else keep your fingers crossed." There's a Reuters story about AT&T being unplugged. Various submissions have noted that some people who still have connectivity have lost their DNS servers. Just add "64.28.67.150 slashdot.org" to your hosts file and you should be good to go. :)

1 of 513 comments (clear)

  1. It's about politics and monopolies and margins by kimihia · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    That's a nice thought, but I think it is all about the capitalism you hold so dear.

    Apparantly the sweet spot for rolling out new services is a population of 3.5 million people. That means New Zealand, Ireland, and a couple of other countries are great testing pots for the rest of the world. Enough citizens to make it a fair test, and small enough to be controllable.

    Now, the question of monopoly ...

    High speed failed in England - it failed badly. British Telecom had the sweet spot of the monopoly, and it wasn't in any hurry to run DSL out to the exchanges and then set everyone up on them. It was raking in the cash with per-minute phone call charges. Why should it change? DSL isn't a very good financial proposition. And they used their monopoly to act poorly and give their customers a really bad taste. RIP broad band in the UK.

    High speed went OK in New Zealand - our local monopoly Telecom was getting its heels nipped by Saturn (now TelstraSaturn), and other people like the Lloyd Group were offering DSL, iHug had their satellite, and Walker Wireless had ... wireless. Because of the way Telecom had been privatised and the legislation stopping it eing a bully in some respects (Saturn and Lloyd Group still got a hard time) they ran out DSL, and quite a few people picked it up.

    New Zealand still has a shabby connections-per-hundred head of population ratio. US also has a shabby ratio too. South Korea is the best.

    But why? Because South Korea embraced that.

    In the US, take a look at them! Bickering over profits. Slack-bums not bothering to do the installs. And you wonder what went wrong?

    It's the mindset.

    And unfortunately for them the US has the wrong one.

    BTW, fibre optic cables installed at exchange up the road. :-)