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Most @Home Customers Still Connected -- For Now
Mansing writes: "There may be hope after all, according to this update from the Washington Post" In short, a reprieve for many @Home customers, with negotiations ongoing between @Home and the major cable companies with which its service is offered -- watch for updates here. (AT&T broadband customers, though, will be moving to another service -- AT&T dropped out of the negotiations to keep @Home for their customers, and say that switching current customers to a new network will take about 2 weeks.)
As a AT&T @Home subscriber, I thought it was pretty funny last night when they showed a commercial for AT&T broadband bashing DSL for having no guarantees of connectivity. Ha! I hope that'll show up on adcritic.com soon, I wanna send that to my friends.
:)
Thank goodness for Work T-1
I'm with Comcast, in Reston VA, and I did not want to go back to dial up. Comcast has been great. Always high speed, and I've never had any downtime. I downloaded RedHat 7.2 from linuxberg in < 1 hour over Thanksgiving weekend. (I'm not sure exactly how long it took, started download, got lunch, after lunch it was done). And they are fairly linux friendly. They don't "officialy" support it, but they use basic DHCP, so it's easy to connect. Just remember the "-h HOSTNAME" switch.
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Get Excited@home with the drama of if you'll actually get the service you paid for or not. My local Circuit City is still trying to sell people @home...
I was with ATT and now I have no connection. See if I'll ever sign up with @Home again. Alot of people are blaming ATT for being the asshole, and causing @Home to go bankrupt.
I'm not very happy with either company, but I have to say I think @Home is the real asshole. ATT may have been providing the acutal wiring to the house, and the installation, etc - but I considered myself an @Home customer. Now I just got ditched by them. Ditching a large percentage of your customers, what kind of recovery plan is that? Do the ever think I'll go back to them,now that I've seen their customer loyalty?
Blah
My internet connection (AT&T@Home Dallas) died on Saturday morning, but it appears that the system is back up and running now, albeit still somewhat shaky. I'm actually fairly surprised at the speed with which AT&T responded to this.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
I've been in the dark as far as Internet access goes since Saturday. My cable modem continually flashes one single light - Power - indicating that it is indeed trying to sync up with something, if anything. AT&T has announced that all of their customers should be online within the next two to ten days, and that for every day I lose internet service, they'll credit me with two days.
In the meantime, I've been experiencing symptoms of Internet withdrawal. Like a drug addict, I've been having fits of convultion when I realize that I can't brush up on my Counter-Strike skillz. We do have a dial-up connection back at home, but it started to refuse to authenticate my username and pass sometime around May, so I've been spending the entire weekend offline. At least with a drug IV you can _feel_ the pain of the needle prick.
I have 2 things to say.
First, now that it appears that each cable company will take the responsibility for providing high speed internet over its backbone, perhaps cable internet will grow faster because the ISP side will hopefully have much less of a bankruptcy fear with the TV side helping fund them.
Second, and slightly off topic, someone needs to check Slashdot's clock. It's still stuck in Eastern Daylight Time, not Eastern Standard Time. Seeing stories with a time an hour ahead is kinda confusing, considering that the same times were accurate in early October.
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
I agree. Of 6.4 million broadband customers in the US, approx 3.37 of them are connected via the @Home network.
Although, I read somewhere that @Home only gets like $15 per customer from the $40-50 you pay for monthly service. Could that be a contributing factor of their bankruptcy?
I'm a Comcast user in Kansas City, KS (suburb of Olathe) and am still on, for now. They actually have this page http://www.comcastonline.com/info.htm where they (seriously) link to their 'backup plan'.
That plan is a 10 hr/mo netzero account! If it wasn't so painfully close to me it would be the funniest thing I ever heard.
I'm one of those brave souls that has _no_ copper into the home, sick to death of the local LEC (SWBell) I refuse to pay one dime to them. So if @home/Comcast go dark, I lose bandwidth for the first time in nearly 7 years.
Help, I'm being repressed!
I have had my cable connection over 4 years and have had few problems. Most interesting was when recently my IP changed from a 24.x to a 66.x, I was unable to get an IP with RedHat6.2 for several days. This mysteriously resolved itself.
As of Monday morning my connection is still normal and active.
I never even got a fricken email. I just woke up Saturday morning and NOTHING! That day I went out shopping for DirecTV + DSL (static IP, domain hosting, 1.5Mbps). Soon I'll be off the AT&T tit completely.
Ceci n'est pas un sig
AT&T broadband customers, though, will be moving to another service -- AT7T dropped out of the negotiations to keep @Home for their customers
Wow, do you guys even glance at the story before you post these days?
Anyway. I always knew these giant corporations would settle their diffrences and come through for the little guy in the end. Wait. No I didn't, this is a complete shock!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I posted this in reply to the how-to in the other thread, but seems I might be better served to post it here or many people might not see it.
FWICT, the best way to get your service re-established goes like this:
-kill your dhcp client. Wipe your leases.
-re-init your cable modem:
(Unplug it, wait 20-30 seconds and plug it in)
-Wait for it to sync up. If it doesn't, keep trying.
-Once it resyncs, run:
tcpdump -i eth0 -lf dst port 68
This should list the dhcp replies going out
on your subnet. If you don't see them,
something is still not right. Try re-initing
your cable modem again.
-Start your dhcpclient
This should get you setup. Remember, if you're like me and were on a static number and blocking dhcp traffic you'll need to alter your firewall rule(s).
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
how the cable companies can still be selling the @Home service to people. A family friend just had the service installed this past Saturday. We still have service through Cox@Home right now, but talk about an under-handed business practice. They should at least put a temporary hold on new installations. I do see thier point though. You still do installations, blame @Home for any problems, but at the same time lock these people into Cable broadband rather than see them go to DSL. Even if this all means temporarily not being able to bill subscribers for service, just the installs.
I am an AT&T cable modem customer and have had the bad fortune of being transferred from @Home to AT&T's own ISP.
They suck massively.
1) Their support are not answering the phone
2) My IP address that has been static since I signed up over a year ago has suddenly changed and it appears that static addressing in any form has gone up in smoke. This screws anyone relying on a static IP.
3) They have been playing fast and loose with the service agreement (that I signed), but instituting an AUP (that I didn't sign)that directly contradicts it.
4) Their DNS service has been very erratic
This is not the sort of crap I want to be paying for and I am actively shopping for a replacement (I.E. DSL). I expect any other user who wants to do more than play with the latest microsoft browser will be doing the same and dumping AT&T as soon as possible.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It's the new alternative to at home. Not sure where "seventy" is.
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...but ever since they shut down AT&T my Comcast speeds have been incredible.
While my heart goes out to the stranded AT&T folk, I really gotta love the SPEED!!!
I was wondering why @Home is going bankrupt, when they have such a large revenue.
The only thing I can think of is that they did too much, too fast. In trying to corner the market, they must have introduced amazing amounts of waste and inefficiency.
I'm still connected in Lafayette, IN, but others (with ATT) aren't. First time in my life I'm glad I have Insight cable...
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
After going through a "reconfiguration" of my AT&T Broadband settings (via one of their automated pages, during the brief hour or so I actually *WAS* online) -- it made my browser home page http://home.attbroadband.com. Seems to re-direct to Yahoo's front page. So, I've gone from Excite to Yahoo, via AT&T? Hrm...
--Xan
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
I was an Excite@Home broadband subscriber in Washington state until around 6:00 AM local time on Saturday. (I was using the service at the time it cut out..) On Sunday morning I received an automated phone message from the local cable provider, AT&T, saying they were taking steps to provide a transition to their own service as quickly as possible. Sunday afternoon I received a second call claiming that they had re-established service in my area.
The claim turned out to be semi-true. The first hurdle turned out to be DNS. The nameservers specified by their DHCP servers have been totally bogus. The first two in the list of three are unpingable and the third replies to every request with a lookup failure / unknown host. So I pointed my systems towards an open, known-good nameserver run by one of my former sysadmin colleagues. Now I've got correct nameservice but it turns out that about two out of three addresses I try are unpingable for reasons that are completely opaque to me. Example: I can ping two hosts (call them A & B) across the country, both sitting on the same subnet. Host A answers, host B is unreachable. Traceroute to host B (from my machine) travels all the way to the gateway that's the last hop before either host, but packets going one hop further to host B don't seem to make the round trip while packets to host A do. (I have, of course, verified through a third host that host B is actually up and reachable, just not reachable from my home.)
Called the provided AT&T tech-support number on Sunday afternoon hoping to find a quick fix (or at least make them aware there was a problem..) The recorded phone message said they don't provide phone support after 8 pm or on Sunday (arggh!) but would be answering calls again at 8 am Monday. Suspecting that I'd have to deal with a bottom-level tech-support script drone trained to reject any request from someone (a) running an "unsupported configuration", and/or (b) refusing to run AT&T's little "Click OK and we'll do a bunch of stuff to your computer's configuration and then we'll all be happy" Windows Configurator utility, which their message insisted I download and run to fix all my problems, I unplugged my lovable little Linksys box, connected the PC directly to the cable modem, rebooted into Windows and ran their damn configurator. It's not like I actually expected it to fix anything, but the only effects I could observe were about 90 seconds (!) of hard-drive activity, a mandatory Windows reboot, and the fact that now all MSIE browser windows say "Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by AT&T Broadband Internet" in the title bar. God only knows what other crap they dumped into my registry, but I was planning a re-install this week anyway. Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)
Anyway, that's a summary of my experience with the transition so far. I'll post a follow-up after things settle out if anyone expresses interest.
Who wants to bet that the new service be msn?
(other likely options being aol and earthlink)
What service would be best for the subscribers?
I was a Charter@Home user for the past 2 years, quite pleased with my 1.5Mb/128k connection (not liking the 128k part too much) but since @Home/whoever shut off that network, I've been connected to what I think is Charter's Pipeline service at a whopping 128k/128k with 700ms response times to a CS server that was 68ms. Added to that, Charter is filtering ports 21, 23, 25, and 80 while leaving open the 139 port that @Home used to filter for MS File shares.
After talking with the billing lady, my bandwidth is supposed to return to 1.5Mb/128k and the filtering "may" return to what @home had within the next few weeks after they convert all the charter@home users to charter pipeline. Unfortunatly, I'm only able to get IDSL where I live, so 128k/128k and a dream of more is still better than 128k/128k and no hope for improvement with DSL.
Heh. Can you say "self-centered"? Hello!? The world does not revolve around you. Do you get irritated when your local news station reports on stuff you don't care about personally? This /is/ news, and it affects a sizeable portion of /. readership. Through information on this site, (primarily through comments, I'll grant) readers are able to keep abreast of what's going on, and get tips on how they might speed things up/etc.
Just because it isn't important to you doesn't mean it isn't news.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
I have lost my connection and may not get it back since AT&T says they will migrate, among other cities, "...some Michigan markets..." Nice. It's already been covered by other posters, but this is AT&T's fault. They'd rather cut service to their customers and point fingers at @Home, than work WITH @home and come to an agreement. But imagine how happy I was when I read that the new AT&T service will be "compatible with America Online"!! Well, that's a relief! You can read more about it at AOL Keyword: BiteME AT&T 5ux0rz ~5wid3r
Mine was cut off at midnight Fri/Sat. Nothing but blinking lights on a useless modem now. I have to come to work to get my 'fix'.
"You can't play with my yo-yo"
Speaking of morons...
READ THE EMAILS, you dolt! I've gotten 15 emails so far (one about every 4 hours when I try to check the ol' @home acct) that tell you to reboot (or release/renew) which gives you your NEW AT&T EMAIL ACCT INFO and info on your new DNS, etc.
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
No one really wants to shut down service. Each side is using it as leverage. The cable companies tell @Home that we will just do it ourselves hence your bond holders get next to nothing. @Home OTOH says if we shut you off, then you will lose customers to competitors and may never get them back. ATT called their bluff and looks to be able to switch everyone over with little downtime(plus the 2 day credit for everyday down isn't bad). What I am trying to figure out is how to make some stupid contracts like @Home did and find a judge to let me out of them.
The meat world is weird, yo?
Anyway. I kinda see how the whole thing happened and I understand why ATT did what they did.
Excite @home was never viable. It seems that management could not tell a big pile of money from a whole in the ground. While ATT's buyout offer was not generous (less than half of the current debt of escite. It was something. Mostly a release from their current state of money hemmorage. May the Excite @home shareholders spin on it.
I appluade ATT for being able to move the amount of people they have moved in such a short time. MY service is working (though not 100% reliably yet). While they are a large festering monopolistic company, they at least had the foresight to set up a backup network to support their customers. I could not go back to DSL and 60k/sec.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
Things went south saturday morning. I still have a cabnle light on, power of course, and enet - then usually only send lights when i try to connect - have tried a brand spanking new dhcp config and other DNSs - the old ones don't work, and substituting others' dns server addresses hasn't worked so far.
Back to my local ISP dialup, glad I kept a back door..
Got the voice mail, and got an email welcoming me to the new service, undisclosed addressee list but when I reply it wants to send thru the ATTBI mail address I swapped in... so some mail is working.
They say 2 to 10 days.
I was 345 in queue at the java chat client last night. Which is an abomination - move / change anything about the window you're chatting in and the text display and buttons go poof until they refresh it... nice.
The CS phone front line seems to have gone to a 3rd party - when they couldn't tell me anything they gave me a # for "real" att CS...
What's the quote from Microserfs? "Weak as kittens, dumb as a sack of hammers." Though she was referring to IBM...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
While the switchover was fairly smooth from Charter@home to the Charter pipeline service via the installer off their website, the ultimate irony came from the local newspaper saying "in order to switch you need to use your cd ---which no one had--- or go to www.charter.com/installer ---which no one could get to, seeing as they lost their service.
What is really rubbing a lot of people the wrong way (yes, "me too") is so far the service for pipeline is more of a "sipping straw"...I've been getting a max (thusfar) upload of 12Kbytes a second, and downloads are in about the same range.
Musstt...control...fists....of....DEATH!!!
This kind of service is *MAYBE* worth 10 bucks a month...maybe.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
TechTV reports this AM (3December) that @Home wants about $300 million to continue service to AT&T. AT&T counters by saying @Home is only worth about $300 million as a complete entity, so they won't pay (and service is cut off).
Cable companies _HAD_ to continue operating as normal including doing new installs. Their contracts with @home required this. @home could have sued for breach of contract if they had stopped selling the service.
Excite@home has signed agreements with 12 cable companies (including cox, rogers, comcast, et al) to continue service for a short while. AT&T@home users. You got shut down Sunday. Sucks to be you.
... No big deal, really. Just make sure you change your service records and such (if necessary) on your DNS servers.
I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with Gary on Sunday. Gary, an @home phone dude, was very helpful and answered EVERY question I flung at him.
Here's the low-down:
** Comcast recently bought-out MediaOne. Comcast is in the process of converting the C@H network over to the MediaOne infrastructure. This would mean that your domain name (computer-wise) would change. Your IP address would change (more later). Your e-mail address will change (domain not known yet).
** IP wise... the current C@H setup is that you set your computer-name to something they force down your throat. You set up for dhcp. You get a static IP assigned from THEIR end. The only thing that's going to change is that you can set the hostname to anything you like.
** Your IP address will change from a 24/8 to a 64/8
** This whole process should be taking place over the NEXT 2 WEEKS! During that time, there will be a semi-scheduled downtime at which time C@H will be switching you from @HOME to @Comcast-whatever.
** There's a hotline you can call for status checks. I am a dumbass and didn't bring that number to work with me.
"It compiles, SHIP IT!" -Overheard at Microsoft's development lab
I posted this in the last @Home discussion, but that was after about 450 posts so it basically got lost, so here it is again.
.org and .com all seem to be taken, so its hard to say what your email address could end up being.
I actually just had a chat with a Comcast rep at a local technology show and it looks like that if your running Comcast@Home you might be in for a significantly better ride than the other providers have partnered with.
Comcast has been working on their own broadband cable network for a bit of time now, partly anticipating the demise of @Home as well as the issues rising out of the severe limitations that @Home put on commercial deals that Comcast wanted to pursue. Originally planned to launch in April 2002, the Comcast network, currently codenamed 'JumpStart', has been pushed forward to a potential launch January 1st 2002, assuming everything goes well. Due to the accelerated timetable there may be glitches in the initial rollout, but frankly intermittently buggy cable (assuming it will be fixed in the near future) is better than dialup in my opinion.
You will however lose your @Home email account as well as any stored messages or address book so back them up as soon as possible. Comcast will provide email services once their network is up and running. What the final name of the program I can't attest to, jumpstart.net
Obviously this is all from one source, though a Comcast representative, its best to avoid taking all this to heart until there is a final formal announcement as to their plans. I do know that Comcast@Home is up and running as of mid-day today. For how long... who is to say.
forma3
The problem with switching thier customers (being a switched customer myself) is that the service is not comparable. My 2 roomates and I went with @home for the down speed. ATT caps the down speed at 1.5 Mbs. Not bad, until you have 5 desktops and a laptop connected up all competeing for the bandwidth. Also two Xbox's running over the network at the same time as online Tribes (or other game) eats that capped bandwidth up.
Also the service is DCHP not Static. And all manner of servers are blocked (I know you can't run servers, we just have mail delivered from forwarded addresses, puts it in our hands and lets us archuve it in our own way).
If this is what ATT considers a comparable service, maybe that's why @Home was so popular. This costs the same, but is not the same.
The really funny thing is, I would be willing to pay more for the service I WAS recieving (more upload needed though). And I woiuld still be willing to pay more. Broadband needs an option to buy a premium service such as I had. Normal DSL speeds are nice for surfing... I've tryed to call ATT to ask about the availablity of packages, but they keep transfering me to a special line for @Home migration with 1+ hour wait times. DSL is nice speed, but more is needed for real power use....
Nothing like losing connectivity to your home box which doubles as your testing rig during the last two weeks of the semester. Guess my advisor ain't getting those results for a while!
Snipped from the NYTimes:
December 3, 2001
Excite to Reach Net Pact
By SAUL HANSELL
Excite@Home reached a tentative agreement yesterday with a group of
cable companies, including Cox Communications and the Comcast
Corporation , to keep their customers connected to Excite's high-speed
Internet service, according to several people involved in the
negotiations.
But not all of the creditors of Excite, which has filed for bankruptcy
protection, have decided whether to support the agreement. That means it
may not be clear for days whether 2.7 million people in North America
will have their cable Internet service cut off.
About 850,000 customers of AT&T , the nation's largest cable company,
were cut off by Excite early Saturday morning after AT&T said it would
not pay the price Excite demanded to keep them connected. As of
yesterday, AT&T had switched about 226,000 of them [in Washington and
Oregon, according to USA Today] to a new Internet access network it has
been building to replace Excite@Home. The remainder will be converted
over the next week, AT&T said.
What is music when you despise all sound?
.. didn't accidentally update all their core routers with buggy firmware like a major UK ASDL provider did, knocking out most of the UK's ADSL for best part of a day..
And with such financial issues hovering over this such companys head, who knows if they UK might get hit by the same deal?. Let's hope not.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
Well, look at their 2000 10-k (it's a PDF). I haven't read through most of it, but the financials are pretty disturbing. $1 billion in debt; negative cash flow 2 years running (-$125.9 million in 2000); $9 billion accumulated deficit; $7.4 billion net loss in 2000 ($18.73/share). Even the auditors report mentions a "substantial need for additional funding" and "substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern."
I don't want to see them shut down any more than you do, but given the financials, I don't blame the creditors one bit.
I switched to Pipeline the Thurs night before @Home was supposed to go down. My connection has been fine since, in fact, it is a little faster. I'm getting a solid 768/768, the only differences: a customized IE with some horrendously white toolbars (which I reset to default), some troubleshooting program (nuked from startup with msconfig), and a dynamic IP (which = suck compared to my "static" IP I had with @Home).
A friend of mine did the same thing but with different results. His connection was okay right after, but for Fri through most of Sun his connection only worked for 2 min intervals. Sun night it appears his issues got fixed and now his is fine.
These both occurred in Madison, WI.
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
@home sold my old email address (and probably everyone else's) to spammers.
I've been using @home for 2 years - I have my own domain, which I (primarily) use for email - I redirect email destined to my domain name to my "real" email account (I'm sure lots of people here do the same thing.)
About 2 months ago, I started getting TONS of spam - before then, I would get one or two spams every month - since then, over 90% of my email was spam.
Turns out that the spam was directed to my @home email address - the same email address that I'd never given to ANYONE (I ALWAYS use my domain name.)
My cable company dumped @home, and since I've switched over two weeks ago, no more spam.
My guess is that @home sold their subscriber list to raise some cash. (my old mailbox name is essentially random letters and numbers, so it's doubtful I got caught in a rumplestiltskin attack.)
As far as I'm concerned, @home can rot in hell.
Only 32 minutes here. =)
Here in Denver they said that people lost their connection totally, and it would be a week or two to fix. Then I saw that they were going to refund users for 2 days of service. I thought two days? If a I was down for a week I should get paid for a week. They should have had a contingency plan in place BEFORE it happened. I mean it not like it was unknown @Home was closing down.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Here's the letter that I got from Comcast@Home (finally!)
---
Dear Comcast @Home Customer,
As you may know, Excite@Home, the Internet service provider for Comcast @Home, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at the end of September 2001. During this process, we are committed to keeping you informed about any new developments and to providing you with the best high-speed Internet service.
This month, Excite@Home petitioned the Bankruptcy Court for permission to terminate agreements with its cable affiliates - including Comcast, Cox and AT&T - on November 30, 2001. If the Court grants Excite@Home's request, there could be a temporary disruption in the services Excite provides to the more than four million customers served by its North American affiliates.
Please be assured that we value your business and are doing everything possible to ensure that there will be no interruption of your Comcast @Home service. Additionally, we have taken the following steps to minimize any inconvenience should a temporary service disruption occur as a result of the Court's ruling:
* Toll-free Customer Information Hotline (1-888-433-6963): you can call in for the latest updates as we work to quickly resolve any issues.
* Web Site Message Center at www.comcastonline.com/info.htm: we will provide online updates and an FAQ section to answer your questions.
* Automatic Account Credits: we will credit your account automatically, so you will be properly reimbursed for any time you are without service.
We also have been working to develop a Comcast-managed network that will provide you the always-on cable-powered, high-speed Internet service you've come to enjoy. We will make this new service available as quickly as possible and will provide you with more details in future correspondence.
Five years ago, Comcast became one of the first cable companies to offer customers high-speed Internet service. We remain committed to providing you with high quality service both now and in the future and thank you for choosing Comcast.
Sincerely,
David Juliano
Sr. Vice President & General Manager
The best descriptive analysis I've read so far of the whole mess can be found here
In another news article yesterday (for which I lost the URL) I understand the FCC, which has jurisdiction, is moving quickly to extend their regulation of RF-Coax cable networks to bring cable service providers into congruity with DSL providers as far as their responsibilities to customers are concerned.
I hope so. Just spent a miserable weekend babysitting the glowlight on my cablemodem waiting to see if my Comcast connection would drop.
Even looking back over business history to before the era of the robber barons, I can't think of a single example of a corporation treating it's customers to such a squalid clownact.
Congressional oversight of the cable industry, and the FCC itself is provided by the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and The Internet Those of you who agree might consider writing to these guys and letting them know that holding 4.1 million customers hostage is something that should never be allowed to ever happen again. I'm expecting a serious investigation in due course, as there should be.
On a more positive note, my connection here remained constant through the whole episode, and services are normal. I suppose to be fair I should also congratulate the negotiators from Comcast and the other cablecos and Excite for reaching an agreement rapidly under brutally difficult conditions.
give me a
How come Rogers @Home service (for those of us up heere in Canada, eh) managed to transition all of their customers before November 30th? (They even gave away prizes between 22nd and 30th to encourage you to switch over your DNS and email settings).
Now, Rogers don't even have the reputation as the smartest cookies on the planet...so it really scares me that a supposed telco giant like AT&T find themselves in this mess.
I'm in Phoenix & I have Cox@Home. What I've found is that about a week before the shutdown, my bandwidth reduced by about 3/4ths. Then it went down completely Friday night and came back up Saturday afternoon. My bandwitdh still sucks though (60-70kB max). Unless I'm on very early in the morning, then it's OK (200-300KB). I'm willing to bet that Excite is running at reduced capacity. Either that or everyone is frantically downloading pr0n and warez to tide them over during a potential shutdown. :)
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Of course, if you have a static IP (and your ISP doesn't block incoming port 25 requests) you could also set up your own mailserver and create a MX record for it. ZoneEdit also offers (for $11/year) a backup store-and-forward mailserver in case your connection goes down. Since you own the domain, you can create as many email addresses as you want -- you can easily provide addresses for your family and friends.
There's really no excuse to whine about losing email addresses, when it's so cheap and easy to provide them for yourself.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Charter Pipeline where I am specifically states that connections are limited on the downstream at 384k. Supposedly this will change in the future, but I am not counting on anything. If there was any alternative available, I would use it. But the only alternative is 56k... so that is no alternative at all.
If cable modem service goes out for my area, I fully intend on switching to DSL. www.dslreports.com shows a dsl connection in my area that is about the same speed as my cable. Of course, if I switch to dsl, then I'll probably get rid of my cable tv as well. I'm curious how many others will do something similar to this?
Don't suppose they pulled the end of the month as the date to shut down out of thin air.
Since it would take a month to get another
service provider I'll probably end up still with AT&T
@ Home and paying for a month of downtime.
Like handheld organizers, service providers are another thing we keep
getting told we need to have yet are left on our own to figure out
why. Service providers are supposed to store CD collections for us,
record TV shows for us, buy groceries for us, connect us to the internet,
yet the amount of
downtime we're caused by centralizing everything
makes me wish we had a good reason for buying them.
AT&T is flexing their virtual monopoly muscle by not coming to some sort of interim agreement with @home to temporarily continue providing service to its customers. Every other cable provider was able to reach some sort of agreement with @home. The New York Times reports that there are 850k AT&T customers without service. It upsets me that AT&T has the audacity to put 850k of its customers out of service. Apparently, AT&T thinks it can afford to lose 850k customers.
I live in AT&T's Chicago market and have been without service since Saturday morning. I got a message on my answering machine from AT&T that said I may be without service for about ten days. I have also heard estimates from other sources ranging from a week to a month. The Chicago Tribune has a related article about the 100k people affected in the Chicagoland area. Every person I know who has a cable modem is affected by this.
I've already been through two DSL bankruptcies (PhoenixDSL and NorthPoint). But, AT&T is forcing me to reconsider DSL once again. I can't get the same maximum speed out of DSL because of my distance from the CO, but I'm fed up with AT&T's handling of the situation. They obviously don't care enough about retaining their customers to have come to some sort of agreement with @home, like every other cable company did, to continue providing service until they were really ready to cut-over users to their new network. Can you imagine if AT&T would have done this with their wireless phone service? Since there is actually healthy competition in place, I'm sure AT&T would have lost a lot of customers...
I had thought that AT&T made a good switch - I was only out of service for Saturday, and Sunday morning I received a recorded call that told me to "reboot my computer and launch my browser" and the AT&T Broadband Internet page would come up with instructions for the new service.
:)
Not being someone who keeps (or even installs) the standard software suite from the ISP, I set my network to use DHCP and kicked it - and got a new IP from the new DHCP server, and (once I realized I was still using the old DNS servers and reset them) everything has been fine.
There are only two problems:
1) the new service is limited to 1.5mbps (download) rather than 3mbps. This is supposedly "to ensure good quality of service for everyone."
2) my static IP is no longer static, or at least the DHCP lease says it is only good for about 5 days. I don't run public servers, but I like to be able to ssh to my box and get files if I need them.
Beyond these things, everything is back to working as normal. The added benefit is that, after using a modem for 24 hours, I appreciate having a high-bandwidth connection more than ever.
Mr. Sharumpe
-- The above comments are just my opinion. If you are going to flame me, save your time. I am fireproof.
I've been down since Sat night with absolutely nothing on the wire. tcpdump completely silent. talk about flipping the switch. this is in Fremont with att@home. their recordings mentioned three days but i doubt it.
forget cable... if and when it ever comes up. though it has treated me well. PacBell installed a DSL repeater somewhere nearby so now my block can get 1.5m down with 356 up that blows cable away for the same price.
if only my neighbors still had internet through their usefull little wireless AP i wouldn't be so annoyed...
Like me, someone who lost his static IP for a dynamic one, I'd like to recommend www.dns2go.com.
.d2g.com to point to your dymamic IP, regardless of what it is. Pretty handy.
The have a client (win32, linux, & more) that basically sends a heartbeat to their servers telling them your IP address. You can then setup a user defined domain within their top level
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
Globe and Mail (CP) Toronto Monday 3 December 2001 Section B1
In an article entitled "Rogers Cable confirms it will sever all ties with At Home", Rogers Cable, Inc. (TSE) President and CEO John Tory describes @Homes prospects (after a few months negotiated to insure Rogers has it's own sustainable networks) as "[It's] out of business. It's gone."
The article also mentions US providers Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications, and the other Canadian providers Shaw Communications and Cogeo Cable Inc. In reference to Shaw and Cogeo, it said that both firms said Friday that "[we] would be almost unaffected if At Home were to shut down its service."
Mr Tory also said that a slight increase in fees to @Home is reasonable to insure an orderly transition but major increases will be rejected, because the transition could be made "in a few hours" if necessary. "I'm not going to sign a bad deal, because I don't have to."
Rogers noted that "a few hundred" Rogers customers using a particular brand of modem were cut off by @Home Friday but that Rogers was able to transfer these customers to it's own network in less than 2 hours.
I have Charter Cable, and over the weekend they switched us from @home to Pipeline.
I was pleased that there was no service interruption, just a phone message telling me to reboot my computer and cable modem so that they would update to the new information.
So far, however, the new service is EXTREMELY slow. There are times when I feel like I'm back using dialup. I have been trying to call their tech support line to ask about the speed problems, but naturally I can't get through. Just busy signals.
I hope they get this worked out, I have had a cable modem for 3 years now, and I have gotten quite used to it. Since DSL is not an option where I live, all I can do is wait and see if they get it straighted out.
Cheers
Tory
paying for a month of downtime.
Theoretically, they're planning to credit us @ 2 for 1 for unconnected days. So if my acess comes back up today, they'll credit me for either 4 or 6 days depending on wether they think its a 3 day or 2 day downtime.
I'm not holding my breath or anything, but that's what they're currently saying.
Hopefully this will be more accurate than their emails saying that they didn't expect any problems with the transition.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
On Friday, after the judge ruled, I called AT&T Broadband and asked if my service would be affected. I was told no. Sometime early Saturday morning service stopped (I was asleep at the time).
I'm switching to DSL (already ordered). It will take about the same amount of time to get it as AT&T says it will take to get my service back. I'm cancelling my AT&T service for the simple reason that they lied to me. Had they simply said, "there might be a problem," I would not be so pissed.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I was down for 1 day,really about 30 hours. I've never been able to have a static IP but in the year I've had the service it's only changed once and I don't think they want to change it very often because their DNS got really messed up when they did it about 9mos ago. Of course AT&T may do it more frequently and have a better Dynamic DNS setup. My firewall is running OpenBSD and of course has been setup to use DHCP on the external NIC. The only thing I haven't messed with is getting my mail account setup. Has anyone done that yet? Did you call the support line or are the instructions for it on the URL the shotgunned to everyone? Thanks and good luck.
Their DNS was not completely updated when my service came back up but it's fine now.
I'm on Charter in the DFW, TX area, and my connection was up by Sunday afternoon. The problem is, I need the static IP addresses for VPN to work, and cannot get hold of Charter *at all* - waited on hold *2 hours* on Saturday night before I gave up - to ask them about getting a static address set back up.
-jeff
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Ditto - I've never used my @home address for email - and that's where the vast majority of spam is coming from.
My email name is pretty rare, there's maybe 100 of us in the country - so they didn't just rumplestiltskin me either.
Legend has it there was a massive dump of customer emails some time back, which @home always denied, but apparently was confirmed in some lawsuit or another.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I was able to reach AT&T level 2 help on the chat facility at http://www.broadband.att.com Sunday evening. Cool thing is that you can see exactly where in the queue you are, and it will count down until you're next in line. All that time spent, only to learn AT&T is being very adamant about not reissuing static IP addresses unless you have an "unsupported version of MacOS." So, does anybody know which versions of MacOS don't support DHCP?
Here are instructions to fix it, or change it to whatever you want .
Called the tech-support number back during their business hours, where I was connected to a service droid. Uninterested in her offer to explain to me the attractions of an AT&T platinum plus premium channel package, I took the initiative and interrupted with "I'm calling because I'm having trouble with the transition from @Home service to the AT&T replacement."
..sincerely regret any inconvenience.. ..will be working hard in the weeks ahead.. etc.." Unsettled by the mention of "the weeks ahead" and unwilling to cede the advantage of momentum, I interrupted again. "But wait! I received a phone call saying service had been restored in my area."
From the other end of the phone, I heard a sigh and a pause as she took a deep breath and launched into a lengthy statement which, judging from her monotone delivery, must already have been delivered at least 100 times. Because of her listless delivery I couldn't quite catch the whole thing but the bits and pieces that made it through were clear enough: "..circumstances beyond our control..
Apparently this was a new and wholly unexpected situation, one for which she was clearly caught off guard. "Oh.. ummm.. hmmm.. Please hold while I forward you to Customer Retention." < click >
Dang! I must admit, I should've seen that one coming. Anyway, I got placed in another hold queue, from which I never escaped. I have no idea what they're retaining in that department, but I seriously doubt it's customers. I was forced to concede defeat an hour later when my cell phone (no land line seemed like such a good idea once upon a time) started giving me the low-battery beep but I knew I was doomed from the moment I was put into the second hold queue.
More updates as the saga develops.. Still having host unreachable problems with roughly 2/3 of the hosts I try to ping..
for each day you don't have service, you get credited for two days.
FWIW, I'm with AT&T@Home, and the switchover was very non-obtrusive, and took like 2 seconds to do... All I had to do was switch from static to dynamic. I switched myself over before AT&T even called me.
Yes, I can fix the title bar crap, but with this (and other Windows installers which assume that practically any key in your registry is fair game) it's the key changes that aren't visible which worry me most.
I install very little on the Windows side of my machine, but it occurs to me that a registry diff program would be ideal for dealing with the aftereffects of over-enthusiastic installers, as much as it pains me to see the burden of vigilance shifted onto the user. Can anyone recommend a good free-software registry diff utility?
Having done contract work for Comcast, I can confirm that their ISP project internally is called JumpStart, and I am pretty sure they're using some Linux servers on their back end. I can attest to that, but there were a whole lot of internal job postings looking for Linux guys.
>switching current customers to a new network will take about 2 weeks
...it has already moved to its own high-speed Internet network nearly 40 percent of the 850,000 customers who lost service this weekend...
What is the source for this? AT&T has said 7 -10 days fairly consistently. Over 40% of customers are already on attbi. AT&T said they will have 600,000 subs moved over by the end of the day Monday, with the rest back up by Friday.
according to reuters:
About 330,000 subscribers in Oregon, Washington and the Dallas area have been moved to the new AT&T Broadband network, the company said in a statement. Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to be moved during the day on Monday, and by day's end it expects to have switched 657,000 subscribers to its network.
The balance of its affected customers will be switched by Friday, it said
and here, from an AT&T press release:
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. - AT&T Broadband moved about 330,000 cable Internet customers to its new high speed Internet network as of Monday morning, Dec. 3, less than 48 hours after the At Home Corporation shut off service for more than 850,000 AT&T customers. The At Home Corporation's action followed a decision in U. S. Bankruptcy Court to cancel cable company distribution agreements with At Home.
The customers moved to the new AT&T network so far reside in Oregon, Washington, and metro Dallas. Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to be moved today and tomorrow, bringing the total added to the new network to about 657,000.
There are lots of other details in the AT&T press release, including what will happen to customers still on the MediaOne network in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Atlanta; Jacksonville; Los Angeles; the Stockton and Fresno areas of Central California; New England; Richmond, Va.; and St. Paul, Minn.
Customers formerly served by MediaOne are remaining on a separately operated network
...
For the group of customers in the markets being served by this separately operated network, the service will be re-branded as AT&T Broadband Internet. For the majority of customers in these markets, the network, Internet service connectivity, email domain names, and data transmission speed won't be affected. The only change these customers will see is new content provided by Yahoo! To access this new content, customers can direct their browsers to http://home.attbroadband.com/.
In my case the earlier emails said that if service does get pulled:
To reboot your computer, and go onto the internet, and you will arrive at some page on how to configure...
I took this to mean that it was assuming you were using DHCP and you need to get a new IP. So I changed my static IP to dynamic, and got a good address on saturday morning. And since I don't give my ISP email address out to people, but my domain name, which gets forwarded, I changed the forwarding as well. I browsed to the attbi site, and got the new names of all the servers etc. All in all, I woke up at 8:30am, and by 8:40 I had everything back to normal. AT&T called me at 10:00am to tell me my internet wasn't working blah blah blah, but I already resolved it...
Here is the migration schedule by city for as of this morning. . .
On Now - Oregon, Washington , Dallas
Mon, Tues - San Francisco, Illinois
Wednesday - Denver, Salt Lake
Thursday - Hartford, Conn., Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and the Rocky Mountain region in the mountain West
See the press release here
I live in Washington state and after my connection being down the weekend things appear to be working again. Of course, the first thing I did was to check download speed. Unfortunately it's about three times slower than before. I was regularly getting nearly 4 megabit download speeds (450kb/second) but now it's limited to 1.5 megabit (177kb). Thanks AT&T! Do I get a 60% refund every month?
Here in Atlanta, we were told "1 to 14 days". That sounds like two weeks to me!
Via phone, and email (repeatidly)
--Xan
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
They lied to me more often... Usually in regards to if I can even get it. Sometimes they say I can, and sometimes they say I cant. One time they even got all the paper work done, I got a user name, and a tech came to my house, and they told me that I can't get it to my face. WTF?!!!
Needless to say, I've been a happy cable camper since then...
I hope. Saturday morning I found that my service was gone. I tried contacting AT&T broadband, but cannot get ahold of anyone. I only get recordings saying that they will have service back to my within 10 days. They also stated that for every day I am without service I get 2 days of credit.
Under the circumstances, I think that is fair. Its excite that has left us high and dry, not AT & T.
[FromTheMorning]
Well, now I'm on AT&T Broadband Internet, which is vastly different from Excite@home. Port 80 isn't blocked anymore (or at least, it wasn't on Saturday), so that's kind of nice.
Still, I'm moving this week, and I think I'm going to learn toward DSL. Too bad it costs three times as much here.
-k.
I have two computer connecting in on my @home connection, both with their own IP, and with the recent changes in @home they set my two computers so they have vastly different IP's, different and subnetmasks placing them on seperate networks. I may not be the smartest person in the world when it comes to networking, but I do know that when two computers are on different networks like that all communications between them must go through a gateway first no matter what their physical relation to eachother. This means that all network traffic that I have going between my home computers is going through AT&T's gateway, giving them the possibility to spy on me. I'm not usuallty the paranoid type, but this seems very intrusive to me. Fortunately I do know enough about networking to change the subnet masks to prevent that, but what about all the hundreds of thousands of people who don't know how to do that? Are they doomed to have insecure home networks with AT&T spying on everything they do? or am I missing something here?
They're still running Comcast@Home commercials in the Detroit area looking for new subscribers. I wonder if they know something or if they are just trying to increase the installed base to make themselves look better to potential buyers.
Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)
You wouldn't believe the number of people that couldn't tell you who they got their Internet service from (or even what type of service - DSL? Cable? AOL?). Name recognition is what will keep your customer from switching to another service (I'd switch, but I am already with AT&T and I LIKE AT&T - they are a nice company). A nameless provider has to get by on actual technical merit, which of course would never work for AT&T.
When they switched the service brand from Road Runner to @Home (great decision guys) they even provided a utility that would take the stupid bird out of RR's branded internet explorer.
"Charter Communications Inc. of St. Louis also dropped its affiliation with At Home and has begun switching customers to its own network. The company has been preparing for the possible loss of At Home service for the past three months, a Charter spokesman said yesterday. More than 90 percent of Charter?s 145,000 At Home subscribers have been switched over to the new network, the spokesman said."
However, according to this cnet.com article, Charter still is working with @Home in the areas they don't have their network in place yet. Unfortunately, I'm in one of those areas. However, I currently have service still, so I guess I'm a lot luckier than the folks with the Death Star as their local cable company.
My local Charter office told me that they would likely be ready with the new Pipeline service early this week. I've had a hard time finding details on the Pipeline service (like whether or not I can get multiple Static IPs). Can anyone provide links?
-- PhoneBoy
The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of anyone, including the poster.
Well duh, it only took you a day to get your service back on. For some people (like us peons in the Pittsburgh area) it could take closer to ten days. Why? Well, they can't do the whole thing all at once. It's gonna take time to get the whole network up. So while in areas like Washington, Chicago, and wherever else they are working on now, there's gonna be a higher-rate of people who think AT&T did a good job. But in other places, where there are more people pissed cause it's taking them a whole week to get their cable kickin again, you're gonna have a higher-percent of irate people and people who switch to DSL.
And thats another thing, I don't get all these people saying "To heck with AT&T, I'm getting my baby-bell telco out here to get me DSL. Well guess what, it's peoplebably gonna take your Baby Bell (or whoever else does DSL in your area) alot longer to get to your house and install DSL than it will for AT&T to get your cable modem blinking again. If you're switching for "The principal of the matter", why? It isn't AT&T's fault @home went bankrupt cause they built too much network too fast.
~~DanNo man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
Frankly, I was impressed by ATT's speedy recovery of my service after @Home made the decision to drop me as a customer. I was down fo less than 24 hours (05:23 PST Sat. - 03:12 PST Sun.) and their automated telephone notification was great. Of course, the Portland and Seattle areas were restored first, so YMMV.
The only critique I might have is that casual internet users, like the guy that I ran into at CompUSA on Sun while I was buying blank CD's. He had no idea what to do, or where to check. All he knew was taht in the morning his connection was gone, and that @Home was in bankruptcy.
But, typically, casual users of all sorts pay the price when things break down, whether their broadband connection breaks down, or their car leaves them stranded on the side of the road.
http//injoke.org -- Culling The Interesting
I have Comcast@Home in the DC area, no interruptions yet (knock wood). Guess they're afraid of cutting off any bigwigs that may be on @home
Every article that I've seen on this so far has failed to mention that a large number of AT&T broadband customers in the north-east are completely unaffected by this. That is, those customers who were previously serviced by MediaOne still have their connection.
The reason is as follows: a couple of years ago AT&T bought MediaOne outright, and that included all of the back-end infrastructure as well as the cables on the street.
--Oren
My service in Oregon is provided by AT&T@home. One would think that the transition from @home to AT&T broadband would be a piece of cake, but this is not true. I have (or used to have) a static IP address. I specifically requested this, and I told AT&T that I was running Linux when I ordered service. Doing this guaranteed that a technician would not lay a hand on my computer. It also proved to be a good thing when things did go haywire, since most times I could get a lot more info out of the tech support flunkies (like IP addresses, DNS servers, gateway IP, instruct them to push my modem on the dhcp server, etc). Everything was fine, until @home was transitioned to AT&T broadband.
Service stopped on Saturday, and I was told by an employee I know at AT&T@home that my area had been transitioned and service should be up and running. I called tech support, and after talking with this incompetent moron for about 10 minutes, I was able to ascertain that AT&T Broadband does not currently support static IP addresses, and it is unknown whether they will support them in the future. (This tech support girl could not even tell me the DNS server IP addresses, since she claimed that she didn't know them, and had no idea where to look to get the info!)
For grins, I decided to connect the modem to a Windows box set to use DHCP. Astonishingly, it got configured by DHCP! They apparently switched every static IP user over to DHCP without saying a word. (In the past, it was impossible to configure a system off of my modem with DHCP, the static configuration disallowed this).
So, I guess that I'm going to have to get DSL now that I've lost my static IP. I just hope that with DSL the tech support line doesn't constantly tell me to go to the new troubleshooting website on my computer for assistance...
At a few minutes after midnight (CST) on Friday night/Saturday morning, my cable modem (connected to Charter@home) reset itself. It came back up less than a minute later. 15 minutes later I had a new IP address, but routing was flaky. It took about an hour or more for the routing tables to calm down and I was able to get to most sites on the 'net that I tried.
The conversion to Charter Pipeline in my area was quite successful - kudos to those network admins for a successful changeover.
No addional ports have been blocked, (incoming ftp still works), and I had downloads exceeding 300K/sec early Saturday morning.
I may need to call customer service to get access to the new news server, but otherwise things look good here.
I haven't had any problems so far *fingers crossed* and I don't use their crappy mail servers anyway.
The biggest downer is that we're now capped at 1.5Mb/s which means I get around 120-150KB/s downloads. With @ home I got 0.8-1.0MB/s downloads. Interestingly their new terms of agreement terms say that we're capped at 1.5MB/s which would be nice, but untrue. I'm sure they'll just quietly update the terms to 1.5Mb/s any day now.
First off, I was a ISDN user my company paid for, then when they fired me / layed me off (thanks Lucent...) I was able to get cable modem via Mediacom (a tiny cable co in Minnesota I guess) that uses @home for the ISP.
I would have preferred DSL but it's not available. One thing I prefer about DSL is the ability to choose my ISP.
I still haven't used @home as an ISP other than the pipe and IP address. I don't use their DHCP/DNS, nor email or usenet server. Visi.com a local ISP costs me an extra $11 a month but it's well worth it to me.
So the way I see it, this whole mess is the fault of the cable industry as a whole to lock us into specific ISP's. Let me choose, then when @home goes away, it wouldn't even be the cable companies problem.
Kind of like when my car runs out of gas. Do I blame Honda??? duh.
YES, there is a McDonald's in Hanoi Square.
Resplendance Registry Light
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
is that @Home is trying to get a better buyout deal from AT&T ... they get a better contract from local cable companies and voila they are worth more.
AT&T of course doesnt want their value to be worth anything more than the pittance they offered so they take some customers with em and voila all that extra money that @home negotiated for is now offset by a large number of lost customers
this all seems to be just run of the mill business practices i would suppose.
the funny part though, is why the heck didn't @home think of it before. I mean...if you have X million customers and are losing X million a month providing service to them, how much of a genious does it take to realize that charging each local cable company a few bucks more a customer will keep your business not only afloat but possibly profitable. Seems like @home finally figured out the answer, but they figured it out too late
I live in Beaverton Oregon - with excite@home I used to get upwards of 8 megabits (and I'm not shitting you in the least - it was wonderful). After the transition I had the same DNS problems and connectivity problems. Anyhow to make a very long story short I now get around 500 bytes per second - and I'm not kidding. I couldn't even check my e-mail... I hope ATT gets their act together like - now (that would be nice).
Well got an automated phone call on 12/2 saying that my service was restored and to reboot. I shutdown and restarted "dhcpcd" and sure enough things were back working again. I updated all of my old userids to use the @attbi.com and things were great for about 3 hours. After that I haven't been able to do anything as the DNS servers they are giving out from their DHCP server are either bogus or are unreachable.
The network appears to be up since my system can obtain a lease from the DHCP server and I see the occasional script kiddie port probing my firewall.
Since a lot of you are having DNS problems, it might be a good time to switch to OpenNIC DNS servers. I did a week ago and it is very cool. You'll be able to resolve legacy DNS zones, such as .com, .net, and .org, but you'll get the cool, open zones as well.
.geek domain! Don't worry if you can't go to the .geek NIC yet, you'll have to set up the open DNS servers for your machine or network.
There is a list of public servers, but please use the tier 2 DNS servers. Find the lowest latency servers and follow the directions if you don't know how to set up DNS.
Then, if you get into it, get a
This entire thing is being caused because AT&T wants to buy out @Home. Even though @home is reporting a net loss, most of the loss comes from the purchasing of equipment. Once cable internet service stops growing so rapidly, @Home will be able to start paying of all their debt because they'll be making money and not paying for so much new equipment. @Home is valued at billions of dollars, yet AT&T (who bought 23% of @Home for over a billion dollars) now wants to buy out @Home for a measly $375 million. AT&T saw that since @Home is reporting a lose (in equipment, as was already stated) they could try to force @Home into bankruptcy court and then buy the entire company for less than 10% of it's value. AT&T knows that the telephone infrastructure that they own is aging and needs to be upgraded. So, rather than upgrade what they own and pay billions of dollars, they see that @Home has already built a large part of the infrastructure and is reporting a net loss. If they can manage to buy it cheap, they don't have to spend as much money. If @Home fails, the only party that profits from it is AT&T. Do we really want Ma Bell in charge again? There was a reason the telephone industry was deregulated.
They have released a detailed description of who's up and down.. They've also said they will give two days for every one that the subscribers are down. Here's the release http://198.178.8.101/faq.jsp?content_id=1081&lobid =1
Here is a tip that muight help in resolving any "after ther migration" issues with ATT. Update your Credit card information to something that does not work. I just changed the expiration date to a bogus month and year. That way they can't just take your money and leave it for you to resolve the issues. I paid for two IP's and a modem. I will obviously not need the second IP when I get DHCP assigned addresses and I will havre them come get the modem. Its $12/ mth (Highway robbery) If push comes to shove you can shift to DSL and refuse to pay ATT.
Help fight continental drift.
I remember some people were wondering how @Home could fail when they took in so much $$ from their customers...
Well... Here's a hint. I closed my @Home account 1 year ago. I had 3 email addresses on that account.
Guess what! I still use ALL 3 of those email addresses, and they all still work beautifully.
Considering the amount of SPAM I get, and how much bandwidth costs, no wonder they are going out of business.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
Second of all, I have a domain registered which was pointed at my static @home IP. It was mainly so I could ssh to my home computer from anywhere, and receive email using a nifty first@lastname.com address. Will I have to switch to DSL now, or does AT&T BI make exceptions to the dynapic IP rule?
Just so its clear to users on Shaw... Shaw is exempt :
Contracts with all the Contract Parties except Shaw shall be and hereby are rejected
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
AT&T controlled ~74% of @Home's voting power as of 12/31/2000, as reported on page 28 of @Home's 10k (PDF). They must really be fuming over this.
Does anyone know if @home billed for service ahead of or after the month of service provided? If ahead of then I paid for 30 days of service and only got 10 days. I plan on calling my credit card company and asking them to reverse the charge.
I don't want to kick them while they're down but its bullshit that I paid for a service I am not getting, I am sure many others feel the same way. It's too bad there had to be a pissing contest with ATT.
My cable had gone down Saturday morning, and I was prepared to spend a couple weeks suffering through dialup access. But I woke up Monday morning to find my cable modem back in business. I had to fire up a DHCP client to get a valid address. No more static IP address for now, it looks like; I think I'll give AT&T a couple weeks to finish moving everyone else over, then get in touch with them about a static address. Or maybe not. Once I realized my static address was gone, I went and signed up with DynDNS.org and changed my DNS records so that my home machine has a CNAME pointing to its name on dyndns.org rather than an A with its old static address. Then I downloaded a dynamic DNS client (lots available for Linux and Windows and others) and set it to send an update to dyndns.org's servers whenever my address changes. My assumption is that this will allow me to keep serving up my Web pages with no more than an occasional brief glitch if my IP address changes. And the lease times are pretty long (5 days), so even those glitches should be vanishingly rare, assuming they happen at all; I'm betting I'll be able to just keep renewing my initial address indefinitely. So the only real downside to being on AT&T's network is that my downloads appear to be capped at 1.5Mbps. Boo hoo, $50/month for T1-speed downloads, don't everyone offer me a hankie at once. Still a fantastic deal, even if it's not as sweet as it was a week ago. Way to go AT&T. One mostly-satisfied customer here. (No downtime would have been better, but I had longer outages than this on my old DSL line even without the provider going bankrupt, so it'd be churlish to complain.)
I've been stuck with a dynamic IP on comcast@home for a while now, but easy external access is possible, even if you're using a router for NAT on your internal network. Get a hostname from somebody like dyndns.org(myhostname.dyndns.org) and point it to whatever your IP is today. Then get a client to monitor your IP and notify dyndns.org when your IP changes. They have a nice interface set up for poor dynamic ip folks like us to programatically update our address. Set it up to run frequently with cron. I use ipcheck (ipcheck.sourceforge.net) with a Linksys router and it has been working flawlessly for nearly 8 months now. When you want to get to your box, you just use your hostname instead of your IP, or if your app really really needs an IP, just do an nslookup on your hostname.
(once I realized I was still using the old DNS servers and reset them)
THANKS
Help fight continental drift.
A welcome suprise is finding my cable internet service is back on. However I find myself dissapointed.
1.) Downstream speeds are limited to 1.5mbit. This was the main reason I switched from DSL over to cable. Because I have no choice who to pick my cable modem service through, I will find myself using DSL again because at least I can a) pick my provider and b) pick my speeds.
2.) Semi-Static IPs are KAPUT. You used to be able to specify an IP and keep it for months on the Excite network. Now the leases are up after 5 days it appears.
What is f**king amazing (and it figures Ma Bell would do something like this) is that AT&T paid Excite@Home $20 a customer to connect to their network. NOW AT&T has a much fatter profit margin BUT lowers the grade of service considerably. Absolutely horrible, horrible customer service.
I'm going back to DSL - the whole Cable internet industry is starting to feel very "Microsoft-ish"
-
aphex
I Steal Music!
looks like AT&T ran their contractual negotiations down to the wire and made no preparations for their customers. I'm an AT&T @Home customer and my email account was shut down without warning. When the service comes back up (they will not even give a time estimate) they tell me my old email address will not be valid.
AT&T tech support told me yesterday that my previous email address, that was shut down without warning, will not be reestablished. Everyone will have new addresses.
Oh quit whining.
They sent you an email two weeks ago warning you that something like this could happen.
They sent you a snail-mail letter a week ago.
In it, they explicitly tell you that something like this could happen, and that you should backup your email at least once a day onto your own system to minimize the potential loss of data.
Quit your whining and stop acting like a cry baby.
Oh dear. I've done it now. I insulted you. Now you're going to want to sue me too, you fat wanker.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Sounds an awful lot like how Adelphia is handling its West Coast @Home customers. They "kept the lights on" all weekend while AT&T was dark. Today, beginning at 4pm PST, Adelphia will be switching us over to Adelphia PowerLink.
Adelphia has a bad rep amongst cable ISPs, but if they handle the rest of this transition as well as they handled the immediate crisis this weekend I feel I'm definitely in good hands.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'm also in the Plano area, and my stuff is back up as of last night off and on, and this morning for good. What I did was use my windows laptop to connect via dhcp and get the information on dns, gateway and ip information, then plugged that data into my unix machine as static information. Also they do have a rule about operating systems that won't deal with dhcp but you have to convince them you actually don't have a dhcp client. It's listed under the "Unsupported OS without DHCP client" section of the transition document. I was on the phone with them for a few hours last night and then again on the chat help for a few more hours but they were not helpful at all apart from "it will take a couple of weeks before we can help you with that". So I said to hell with it, and did my little maneuver. The only problem is I still have to test if I can ssh/telnet/ftp/whatever into my box now.. I hear they're blocking ports.. if that's the case I guess I'll have to take earthlink up on their free installation deal they sent me in the mail. (great timing for them huh?)
No todo lo que es oro brilla
I did, just to see what happened, and found out that instead of my previous 24.x.x.x address, I now had a 12.x.x.x address, and everything worked quite well, and the nameservers are responding as expected. Now that I know my new address, which has nothing to do with my old address, I could probably use it as a static address. I've already let Public DNS know of my new IP address; hopefully I won't have to change it anytime soon.
Before that I was able to ping some machines but not others, just as you described, from my location here in Seattle.
Unfortunately I don't know if there's any way to determine your new address without using DHCP. I doubt it, since indications from AT&T are that they aren't supporting static addresses.
Someone you trust is one of us.
My AT&T service cut out Saturday morning. I got the (incredibly self-serving) AT&T recorded message that afternoon. It said that AT&T would call me "in the next week" with further information as they transitioned to a different provider.
About ten minutes ago, (about 13:00 PST) I saw a little bit of flashing at the NIC and tried renewing my leases, and bang! service came back up. I live in El Cerrito, CA, just over the border from actual DSL service, so I'm really happy to be back up, as I have no broadband alternatives. I'd be even happier if there were someplace other than AT&T I could take my business, but it looks like it's not in the cards...
Anyway, it sort of feels like someone just took their boot off my windpipe.
You know, I noticed the same thing vis a vis the new 'speed cap' at 1.5 Mbps. This sucks. Bad enough that all of the AT&T customers, myself included, have to deal with a major service disruption but now we also get to use a service that is also markedly slower afterwards. I smell a class action lawsuit brewing...
The new 'speed cap', plus the now mandatory dynamic addressing is starting to make DSL much more attractive.
Unhappy AT&T Customer #587994
Not so "duh." Consider that ATT owns 25% of Excite@Home and, more imortantly, retains 75% controlling interest, the rest held by Excite's other "customers," Comcast, Cox and others.
Of course the deals they made were advantageous to the cablecos!
PLUS: ATT tried to scoop up Excite at a bargain rate after they drove it into the ground, hence acquiring a valuable network and escaping the debt accrued with the cable purchases they made.
Today the ATT Broadband auction takes place. Consider: they just added nearly a million users when Excite "independently" decided to cut off the att@home users. Hmmm...bad business?
Only if you are referring to ethics.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Every cable company has made a deal with Excite@Home, either to continue service for the time being or to transition service away from @Home... except for one company, AT&T Broadband. This would be nothing special, except that AT&T is also bidding for Excite's assets. Why does AT&T want to buy a company that they used to use for their cable network, but will, in a week's time, have completely transitioned away from? Either AT&T is going to drop their bid for Excite@Home (if that's possible), or something's wrong here.
"Please listen carefully to the following important message regarding your AT&T @Home service. Due to the recent bankruptcy filing by Excite @Home, your service will be temporarily interrupted as we work to migrate you to a new AT&T network. We apologize for any inconvenience. We will be calling you again within the next week to let you know when your service will be ready. Please be assured that you will receive two days of credit for every day of interrupted service, and that we are doing everything to restore your service as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience."
I'm not sure what people are ranting about, "@home is capped now!" "@home sux, get dsl!"
:)
I live in Ontario, Canada, and couldn't be happier with the recent @home transition. I still get 250kB+ dl and 50kB up. DSl completely sucks in Ontario with a mere 125kB dl and 15kB up (those are optimal speeds ie. rare).
I think the entire data infrastructure of the US sucks ass as a whole. Ya I'm sure California has 100000000000 terabit fiber lines, but I also hear people with 45k DSL, capped cable and others that are happy to get 41k on a 56k modem.
DSL doesnâ(TM)t rule, Cable doesnâ(TM)t suck, it all depends on you area, and in many cases, your country.
Oh.... and Canada rulez and.... damn, I'd usually say US droolz, but after Sept 11th I keep on getting the uncontrollable urge do hug Americans
Just use DHCP and all is well.
Lets be a little more specific. The link you allude to takes you primarily to the AT&T Business Solutions site. The residential DSL offered on it is DIRECTV DSL(TM) High-Speed Internet Service. This is alongside the Business DSL offerings. AT&T has had these offerings for quite some time time.
I had been, and still am actually, an WorldNet dial-up subscriber for many years now. I've had a mostly excellent experience with the service. There has long been interest from WorldNet subscribers for a broadband offering from AT&T. They have always pointed subscribers to the DSL option of the Business Solutions or the @home servive. All of which are seperate from teh WorldNet dial-up offering.
Personally, I'd like to see some convergence of these services, so that I can have a WorldNet broadband offering with dial-up rather than seceral ISP services. I used to have SBC DSL with SNET in CT. It sucked. I moved to Chicago recently and went with cable as an experiment. I've had pretty good luck with AT&T@home...i only hope it wil continue.
Related, a collegue in the Dallas TX are has AT&T@home and have been switched. Reports are that it was painless and working just fine. I suppose only time will tell.
'nuff said
I have yet to get a phone call notifying me that service has been restored (I did get the one Saturday telling me that I had lost service), but service was back up and running this morning. The mail server is still 'mail' (mail.attbi.com now), but news has changed from 'news' to 'netnews' and there no longer appears to be a web proxy. 'news.attbi.com' and 'proxy.attbi.com' resolve to the same host, which pops up the how-do-you-get-converted page (so if you have your web browser configured to use proxy:8080 as an HTTP proxy, you will only load this how-to page until you reconfigure). I noticed if I send email to my old home.com email address that it is being forwarded to attbi.com, and the DNS entry for my old hostname now points to the same proxy.attbi.com machine. My username and password came through without a hitch.
(yall might want to mod this up.)
ATT just posted their schedule for switching over people who are not switched yet. (e.g., your cable light is out- like for those of us in illinois).
Here it is, not bad for the Illinois ones:
Please review the following AT&T Broadband Internet migration schedule to find out when your high-speed cable Internet service will be available on the AT&T network.
Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to move this Monday and Tuesday
Customers in Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah are scheduled for Wednesday
Customers in Hartford, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Sacramento, California and the Majority of the Rocky Mountain region are scheduled to move on Thursday
Customers in Michigan will be moved on Friday
You will be contacted by AT&T Broadband with further instructions when the transition of your high-speed cable Internet service is complete.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this interruption may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to provide you with the best high-speed cable Internet service possible.
This same message was delivered to Salt Lake subscribers.
How many other AT&T @ Home subscribers got thier bill the same day they were shut off?
Rob
um, as far as I know phoenixdsl never actually went bankrupt - they just merged with a business only provider who dumped all the home connections to other providers. They dumped me to Telocity, but with Northpoint's demise about 2 months later, Telocity no longer offered service in my area (Rhythms and Quest in area, but SDSL only - and I'm only about 5000ft from the local hub... which only Quest has equipment in... which Quest had no more lines to connect more users with... go figure). Quest wanted more money for less service anyway, so I went with a cable modem instead. Now I've lost service with that.
No calls, just a warning that it might happen about a week ago then no connection on Saturday morning. I actually had service until about 8:30 AM CST, as I was on the internet at the time the plug was pulled.
That's alot of phone work do to short notice. Easiest way = prerecorded message and autodialing.
After a bit of poking around with the network, I finally figured out the problem. For some reason DHCP was telling my computer to use a gateway, but the gateway wasn't responding to pings. Fixing the routing tables (using 'route') to not try to use the gateway got me back on the internet.
As for the DNS, the first two servers in their list worked intermittently, and the third always returned lookup failure. I haven't encountered any unreachable hosts, fortunately, and now everything seems to be working right. Hopefully they've got everything figured out and won't break it again.
Human/Ranger/Zangband
What really angers me is I get like 1/3rd the speed I used to get, for the same price I used to pay! 1.5Mbit, come on, whats that, not quite 200KB a second down! I used to get 400-500K downloading a new kernel, or getting a song from mp3.com. Now In all reality I cant get anything higher then 150KB/second,and most things that used to be 300-400,are now sub 100KB a second. If im going to get 1/3rd the service as before, I expect to pay 1/3rd the cost. What even sucks worse is their is no real alternative. DSL is even slower, to get DSL that even matches these download caps your looking at 200-300bucks a month. I wonder if they will let me sign up like 3 times for cable modem, then I could aggregate the bandwith. BTW, FYI, Im a seattle att@home customers, weell, ATTBI customer now. I was up within 24hours as well.
Jeff Knox
Lot's of you guys are saying SF Bay Area is up. Well, my RCA modem now has two solid lights but still no dhcp connection. Am I the only one without service or what? Mind you I didn't get a phonecall yet, but their website says my zip code is back up now. Any ideas?
accts have been moved to attbi.com. The only thing still broken (for me, at least) is the ability to send email to @home email addresses (e.g. those who kept their old addresses when things switched over). Network connectivity is still a wee bit dicey, but getting better by the minute. Took a reboot of my router box (Freesco, yeah baby!) and Win2k boxes.
l
h tml
help is at:
http://transition-aid.attbi.com/attbi.com.faq.htm
and manual config info is at:
http://transition-aid.attbi.com/attbi.com.manual.
The highlights:
TCP/IP:
Make sure DHCP is turned on. DHCP allows your computer to automatically request network settings from the network. With this setting enabled, there is no need to directly set any other TCP/IP settings.
E-Mail:
POP3 (Incoming Mail) Server: mail.attbi.com
SMTP (Outgoing Mail) Server: mail.attbi.com
Your E-Mail ID: You still have your old e-mail ID, but the domain (the part after the "@" sign) has changed; you must change the domain to "attbi.com." If your e-mail address was "buddy@home.com," you should change it to "buddy@attbi.com."
Web Browser:
Home Page: http://www.attbi.com/
(You may, of course, choose any home page; for the latest information provided by us at AT&T Broadband Internet, we recommend the above.) Proxy Server, and Proxy Automatic Configuration: None should be set.
UseNet Newsgroups:
NNTP (UseNet) Server: netnews.attbi.com
i was apparently the 68 or 69th person in the nation to make the transition to the attbi network from excite's (i'm in oregon). aside from the obvious question why we were the first to make the transition, i'm quite miffed at att's tech support. i understand that they were most likely busy, but no one with whom i spoke knew a damn thing about what was going on.
overall, i'm neutral about the switch. i do like my new, lower ip, but i fear that it isn't going to be quite as static as my old one. either way, attbi looks "cleaner" than @home, imo.
This was a shock to everyone, @home has been lying to its customers (Cox, Comcast) so heh.
Sprint ION, AT&T Wireless, and @home.
Where is the +1 Irony Mod?
Final (and very unexciting) update:
After several days of trying fruitlessly to contact tech support about my unreachable hosts problem, things came to an unexciting conclusion this morning, when some change on AT&T's part fixed the problem. No problems contacting any host I've tried, though I think I'll give it a while before I try to use AT&T's nameservers.
I'm less than pleased with the runaround I got from their support hotlines -- all told I spent over three hours on the phone over several days and never once got to speak with anyone competent to help with my problem. However, I've worked in networking before and am willing to cut AT&T some slack on the support side and some credit for a speedy and fairly smooth transition. They restored service to me and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of other users after only a few days and that's worth keeping in mind..
MacOS 7.5.3 on a non-powerpc mac. I'm positive that you need OpenTransport for DHCP to work, and I think the oldest versions that OT worked with was like 7.5.5 or 7.6.
I don't know if this is the newest version that won't work, but I know it won't work. AT&T might not support non-powerpc macs at all, so you might want to go to ftp://ftp.info.apple.com and get the OpenTransport standalone installer and see what it says its required system is.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.