Some People @Home, Some Not @Home

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. :)

Comments

Somewhat working

[brocktune]

I changed DNS to the old Mediaone servers and I'm working again. My DHCP-generated IP address changed. Mail and news are not up yet.

Details on how to change are here. I assume other folks can replace the "ga" in the URL with their state or city name. There was an email sent out last week with more details.

more dns #'s

[loraksus]

4.2.2.2
4.2.2.3
provided to you by verizon and painfully easy to remember.

I'm still shocked about how this is happening in the USA. I mean, if it happened in some eastern bloc country, or some nation in Africa that is very corrupt / piss poor, I could understand, but here?
No offense to people in those countries, btw, it seems that the telecommunications infrastructure in most countries is beter than that of the usa.
I honestly don't understand why the service costs so much in the usa - In BC, Canada, 1.5mb down / 768 up, 2 static ip's for $40 a month CANADIAN! Here, I pay $55ish for a whole 768dn / 100k up, a dynamic ip and shitty ping. WTF. The Canadian dollar is worth less, so it stands to reason that the equipment costs more for the Canadian providers (because they take in canadian $, not us $) . . .

bah, at least my dsl provider looks like they will be in service for the next month or so....

Re:more dns #'s

[seanadams.com]

4.2.2.4: i-will-not-steal-service.gtei.net

Kinda stupid, actually. "Hey, we've left our DNS servers accessible to the public with no access control, but please don't use them unless you're paying us"

Most people configure their DNS servers to allow anyone to do a recursive lookup, because usually there's no point in using someone else's DNS as opposed to running your own or using your ISPs.

If they wanted to prevent the public from using their DNS servers, they would have one set of servers only accessible to their own customers, and another set accessible to the world, but which only served domains they were hosting. It's very easy to do, so it's silly of them to insinuate that we're "stealing" by using name servers which have been deliberately left open.

Re:Bad, stupid move by Excite@home...

[trenton]

Excite@Home actually didn't make the decision to turn off the modems. The bondholders that financed Excite@Home did. AT&T's offer was so low, they stood to loose tons of money if the deal went through. So, they filed a law suit and had a judge COMPEL Excite@Home to turn off the service. Their reason for this was that keeping the modems on was costing 6 million per week, thus causing the company to lose even more money.

It still remains to be seen if the bondholders will come out ahead. They claim that the assets of Excite@Home alone are worth much more than AT&T's buyout offer of $307 million. I guess they're waiting for a better offer.

But, to be sure, pissing off 850,000 people is sure going to lower the value of Excite@Home.