Slashdot Mirror
Excite@Home & Comcast/AT&T Reach Agreement
whee writes: "Through a $160 million deal, it looks like Comcast users will have Excite@Home supplied access for at least more three months (press release). Comcast anticipates moving existing customers over to a new Comcast-owned and managed network before the new contract expires." As well, it appears that the folks who were using AT&T's brand of Excite@Home are back online - as this press release said. T: CNET also has a story on the 3-way deal.
Comcast users will have Excite@Home supplied access for at least more
three months
more three months? what the hell?
Try NOT@HOME!
tcd004
Comcast@home was supposed to be available in Norris, TN since about a month or so ago. Is it here yet? Nope, they seem to just be dragging their feet. Every week I stop by a Comcast kiosk at a local mall, and they tell me the same thing, "Nope. Not there yet," with no indication of when it will be here. This means I'll likely be waiting three more months to get it...
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
df
I still don't have service in Sunnyvale, CA and my friend in Mountain View does yet he is literally 2 miles away, maybe less.
I don't particularly care for the way this whole excite@home situation has been dealt with on a public relations front. Personally, I had to email my service provider to get information concerning this, and then they suggest things like "Check our website for updates."
I can't do that if I don't have service..
You would think that in an age where people have become dependent on the internet for just about everything that these companies should be obligated to tell you when they are just going to cut you off, or when they really don't know what's going to happen. It's not like you've violated your end of the deal and they have the right to "discontinue service at any time."
AT+T was NOT part of this deal. AT+T has not made a deal with @Home. Comcast has NOT bought AT+Ts cable buisness (yet). AT+T IS moving customers to their own network infrastructure. AT+T had moved 10% shortly after the plug got pulled. AT+T has NOW moved 40%. They plan to move the rest by Friday. Sheesh.
READING IS FUNDAMENTAL. Try it sometime.
Well, most things are working again here in Sunnyvale, California. However, if you call AT&T's tech support line, they indicate trouble in California and few other states. For me, the trouble appears to be that I can get to some big sites like slashdot, but a lot of obscure sites are not coming up. I wonder if this is a caching problem -- anything really popular is still cached by AT&T, anything not popular is a "black hole" for me.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The title and the news peice make it sound as if ATT reached a deal with @home, and ATT@HOME is back. This is not true. ATT has reached no deal with @home, and is switching all its customers over to its network. Anyway, it was misleading.
Jeff Knox
I am one of the many AT&T@Home customers who got switched off this weekend. I was notified by phone that it would be 7 days before my Internet connection was back up again. I was pleasantly surprised to find it up and running when I got back home from work tonight. I set my ethernet card to DHCP and was off and running as soon as it grabbed an IP.
. We should give AT&T credit for handling this well and for getting us online in half the time they originally promised.
Anyway, I was just reading the other article about @Home, and noticed the many complaints about the new 1.5MBps download cap. All I can say is, Are you serious? After using dialup for two days, I'm glad I have broadband again!
Let's look at the facts:
-- I had Speakeasy DSL at my old place of residence. I got 5 static IPs and a 1.5 down/384 up connection for $100 a month. Now, for half that price, I get the same download speed. I really don't think there is a complaint to be made there.
-- The Speakeasy/Covad/PacBell trio took six weeks to get my DSL installed. I found I had to reset the modem every month or so because it would myseriously give up the ghost. My cable modem was installed at 8AM the day after I called, and running by 8:30 that same morning.
I have only once had to reset my cable modem, excluding this weekend's outage.
--AT&T said that they would take 7 days to get those of us in the Bay Area back up. They took 3. Not bad, considering this was pretty much unexpected on their end.
-- As some of you in the Bay Area know, the @Home gateway out of San Jose was completely overtaxed. My ping on my favorite Quake III server went from 27 to 100 within the past couple of months. Now that I'm on AT&T's new network, my ping is 50 -- quite acceptable.
For those of you whining about the 1.5MBps cap, I say go back to dialup. Better yet, sign on with PacBell DSL. You'll get 608/128 (yes, less than half the speed you get now) for the same price. Plus, you'll get idiots from tech support and billing problems (by the time I cancelled PacHell and moved to cable modem at my current place of residence, they had managed to rack up over $900 of incorrect charges on my account, which took 4 months to resolve.)
Let's not forget that there are still millions of broadband-starved people in this world. I should think that there are better things to complain about than the fact that your $40 a month broadband connection went from sometimes-incredibly-super-fast to still-fast-but-maybe-not-as-fast-as-it-was-before
Any hope of keeping existing customers flew out the window already, they might as well give up.
The line that worries me is regarding "converting" my account to their new scheme. Sounds like a good time for them to raise prices (again) or lower services. Lets hope not.
(attached letter from comcast)
Dear Comcast @Home Customer,
I am pleased to announce that Comcast has reached an agreement with Excite@Home,
pending approval from the Bankruptcy Court, that provides you with uninterrupted
high-speed Internet service. Comcast's first priority is to provide you
with reliable and high-quality service. This agreement also will ensure
a smooth transition from your current service to an improved, all-Comcast
managed Internet service in the weeks ahead.
Comcast High-Speed Internet will provide you with the high-speed, always-on
connection you've come to enjoy. This new Comcast service also will offer
improved reliability, customer support and features, such as "e-mail from
anywhere" with web-based e-mail and an innovative storage solution for
MP3s and photos.
We will provide you with notification and instructions on how to convert
your account to Comcast High-Speed Internet before we introduce service
in your area. In addition, Comcast will continue to provide you with regular
updates on our toll-free hotline at 1-888-433-6963 and on our website at
http://www.comcastonline.com/info.htm.
Having this agreement in place is an important piece to ensuring a smooth
transition to Comcast High-Speed Internet. We appreciate your loyalty
as a customer and apologize for any inconvenience you have been caused
in the last week. We will continue to aggressively strive to provide you
the best high-speed Internet service and support possible. Thank you for
choosing Comcast.
Sincerely,
David Juliano
Senior Vice President, Comcast Online Communications
e x p e c t d e l a y . c o m
Though with an onerous *download* bandwidth cap of 1.5 Mb. My downloads from a known fast site went from 600 K/sec to 187 K/sec, as reported by lftp.
This appears to apply to the internal servers as well - newsgroup downloads are now down to 151 K/sec.
And the "no server" rule is in the top four FAQs.
Does anyone in the bay area have mutliple IPs working via DHCP yet? It seems like one of my machines at home in Fremont got an IP but the others still time out when trying to contact the server. Unfortunately, they are all Micro$oft boxen so I can't do too many tests to see whats going on :(
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I'm in the same boat as you - formerly ATT@home, now attbi.com. My service did not work when I plugged in the broadband router I had been using for the past six months, but it worked just fine when I removed the router. I figured that maybe AT&T was filtering known router MAC addresses on their new network (as some ISPs have been known to do), but then I changed the MAC address on the router and it still didn't work. Then I tried it on my buddy's DSL connection and it worked perfectly.
Something suspicious is definitely going on here. I think AT&T found a new way of blocking routers on their new network. Has anyone else figured out how they are doing this and how to fix it?
-sting3r
What the article fails to mention is that @Home is closing its doors in 90 days. That 3 month extension is only to allow cable operators to roll out their own service. After then, @Home is going dark and selling off everything.
Linux is for fags. You are obviously a homosexual!
1) The $320 million Comcast and Cox (NOT AT&T) are paying @Home will be the last revenue @Home will ever see. Both Comcast and Cox are planning to have their users migrated to their own networks well in advance of the expiration of the 90-day contract term.
2) By flipping the bird to AT&T, @Home lost whatever bargaining leverage it had with them. AT&T said they could have their network up and running in short order, and they appear well on track to do so. I'm one of the disconnected AT&T@Home users, and here in San Mateo CA, we were down for a total of 48 hours. I was back up this morning with full connectivity. (And to all you people whinging about the AWFUL 1.5Mbps download cap, please inform me where you can get T-1 speed for under $50/month and I'll gladly sign up. Didn't think so.)
3) Item 2 above led directly to today's all-hands at @Home where CEO Patti Hart announced that @Home is history after the Comcast and Cox contracts finish on March 1, 2002. AT&T has pulled their bid for the company, and barring a rescue at the 11th hour, @Home will convert their Chapter 11 filing to Chapter 7 in March.
Add them all up, and that's one dead company. Maybe AT&T did put them in this position, but speaking for the subscribers, we really don't care whose fault it was.
I'm noticing >500ms ping times to a local router beyond my cable box - a symptom that I've seen happen before they disable modems. Upon calling Adelphia (Carlsbad, San Diego, CA), they said that they're sutting off today.
It should be coming back online on/around Dec 16th as a new local service.
- ez
(Just FYI)
My access has been off since Friday and is still off. One of my friends wrote an angry letter and was told service should be restored later this week. But as all broadband users know, even an hour without access sucks major ass, so a week is completely intolerable.
Couldn't AT&T just pretend to stay in negotiations so @home wouldn't turn off access before they set up the new network?
I've got Cox@Home and haven't seen any interruption as a result of this. It looks like Cox has the sam $160M deal for 3 months. See press release at cox.com.
Upstream and downstream speeds will be managed to provide a faster and more consistent broadband service
I'd heard rumors that the much bemoaned 128kbps upload cap would be joined by a 1.5mbps download cap, and the quote from their press release seems to confirm this. Last week, my downloads benchmarked to about 4.5mbps (courtesy of www.dslreports.com), but now I'm getting a little under 1mbps. No complaints for now, though -- I'm just happy to be back online.
PS - Don't wait for AT&T to call you. I unplugged my modem for 30 seconds, renewed my DHCP (or you can reboot your PC), and voila, I'm back online! (Petaluma, California)
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Hi all, Im an at&t client and we got back connection this morning in the SF bay area, although no real transfers till this evening as they were litterally pluggin/unplugging hardware down at the center. after over 3 hrs on the phone on hold (not including the 2 trying to get on hold) a tech told me he had no idea what my new ip, dns, router info should be becasue there computer apps were down. so no help cept to give me the newuser.attbi.com address and try using winipcfg on one of my PC's to reset the modem haha. anyway my final solution was to run their "confuiguator" on one of the networked computers through my lynksys firwall/router to get the connection stable. As to all of you whining, sush and go find another provider, these boys work hard to keep us up and running. also one question as of now i an a dynamic address, but would really like a static back that i had for the last year. anyone know if at&t will be providing that service again? thanks all
Maybe Slash could buy it. Or better yet sell it to MS, and help bleed the beast of Remond as they desperately try to show how to run things right.
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
As well, it appears that the folks who were using AT&T's brand of Excite@Home are back online
Yeah, back online through NETZERO! Do you have any idea how slow netzero is? I read that, got all excited, turned my modem back on, and then discovered that it still won't sync. Thanks for nothing! hehe
After came back from work tonight, I was surprised that my cable modem was syncing up again. Tried to set my gateway to DHCP mode and soon the browser leads me the welcome page... I found there is actually nothing informational, for surfing the net, you only need to setup dynamically grabbing a IP address instead of the priveious static one (Look like my static IP is gone now.. :(().
Unfortunately I found I can not go anywhere else, although I can ping anywhere I like. Whenever I fired up the browser, I will go to the anonying Weclome page automatically no matter which address I keyed in...
Surprising, I can visit Slashdot.org, of course all the external links don't work. I can only view the post here and the headline inside of Slashdot... It is ok to post something here, but what's the problem? Do I missing anything in the setup? The AT&T phone service is damned, nobody answering it, and hang up directly after you pounch the "1" key.... Help needed.. or information needed... please tell me your experience and the transition...
As I've said before, the fastest pipe does no good if it's only getting water from a trickling spring.
Their caching techniques will remain, @Home has made its contribution to the infrastructure knowledge base of this I-net thing, and we all move on.
If there is a market, someone will step in to fill it. If it is cheaper for Comcast, ATT, Cox Cablevision and Big Bob's Bait, Tackle & Routing to buy some level of service from an "@Home" style of super ISP, then such a thing will happen again.
@Home's failure doesn't get me down. I worked with many of those same people at different times, the people and their skills remain alive and well and ready to move on to the next project.
How's Juniper stock doing, anyway?
Use it up, wear it out, make do or do without.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Well, first of all, it sucks that AT&T forced the @home bankrupcy. But had @home's finances been in order, it wouldn't have happened. They made some bad decisions, drained their cash reserves, incured debt, and put themselves in a vulnerable position. AT&T just smelled an easy buy, and went for it. Everybody loves Capitalism, and this is its finest hour.
The sad part is that @home is pretty much dead. I was a customer of Rogers@home. Now it's just Rogers (for those who do not know, Rogers is the cable monopoly in Toronto, Canada). They made the transition, and while it was pretty messy, it's done. And you can be sure they're not moving back to @home. They took 400 000 subscribers away from the 4mil that @home had. Same for Shaw@home (which is another Canadian cable company). That's another 2-300 000 subscribers.
Not to mention AT&T, with God knows how many customers. Actually, God might know, or even google.com, but it's too late at night for me to check the actual numbers.
And those are not by far the only companies that decided to leave @home. So now Excite@home is left with less than half of its former users, maybe even less. But it has the same debt, and an even worse situation. Just the fact that they came close to shutting down and it killed their former image. If it would have been hard for it to survive before the bankrupcy, now that's pretty much impossible. So the bond holders that opposed the AT&T buyout are just as screwed, if not worse.
AT&T is NOT "back up" unless you call going from relatively solid service with a static IP to spotty service with a DHCP server that can't figure out if I can own an IP or not since it is constantly being resurrected. F*** AT&T. F*** Excite.
RANT: The thing I don't like is their desire to make reconnecting easy by making it very, very hard. In other words, they say "reboot and open browser which will connect you to a web page with directions" when I'd appreciate it if they'd just give me the damn directions by mail or phone or at least have them available on their site so I can read them from my connection at work. Nope, they're nowhere at all, though after 10 or 15 minutes I managed to find the web address my browser was supposed to open to - or at least I think I did. So now they say I'm connected when I'm not and it's impossible for me to have any inkling of an idea of whether there is something I need to do to get things to work.
Can anyone post the directions you're lead to when you first reconnect to the service?
finally. sharing a 28.8 modem with my roommate this weekend was very painful. incidentally, i'm very impressed/happy with openbsd's handling of ppp-on-demand + nat + ipf.
:(
in general things seem pretty much the same, except:
- no more static ip
- no more web proxy server
- max downstream has a lower cap?
with @home, i could grab things like the sun jdk at some ridiculous speeds. i remember on several occasions in the past year getting the whole ~30MB file in ~2 minutes. i was utterly amazed by those speeds--i didn't think it was possible to reach those speeds on a cable modem. not sure if it had to do with their web proxy server or not--i always imagined it must have.
just tried downloading the 1.3 jdk with attbi, and the download caps at about 111 KB/s. @home always claimed a 1.5Mb/s cap, but there always seemed to be exceptions to that.
anyone tried playing a multiplayer network game like quake3? i remember latency sucked with @home compared to my friend's dsl.
I'm just your J.R. Random letting you know how my switch from AT&T @home to ATTbi went. At around 3:30 am on Sunday my @home connection died, I know this because that is when my last minute ftp of MDK 8.1 CD 1 died. I woke up, and every site my browser pointed to was an instruction site letting me know my new configuration info, so I changed my router's information, shut off the router and my cable modem for a few seconds, and then reapplied power. Presto, 30 seconds later I was back online. No problems with any of the computers behind my router.
A few things I noticed right off the bat was that my previous @home connection gave my computer a dns entry that was static, and -could- be used to host a site, it followed the convention of hostname.city.state.home.com. But now my computer's "url" doesn't seem to make any sense, and rather than being associated with my current IP address, it links me to some control panel of sorts, however the last I checked it wasn't really complete offering a few tools, but no UI.
Secondly, I read up on AT&T's website, noting that my parents' user@home.com e-mail account would now be user@attbi.com, which is not nearly as easy to remember, or to give out, and that all mail sent to @home would not be redirected, but rather rejected. Unfortunately, any mail sent to their old account returns the following:
This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:
HEIALMBOS.MHRIH
Isn't that helpful? I was hoping it would at least advise the sender to change the hostname of the e-mail address. Secondly, AT&T@home previously placed a 650 KB/s downstream, and 128 KB/s upstream cap on our connection. However now on attbi we have 1.5 Mb down (which after running a speedtest I found to hover around 1.1 and 1.2 Mb/s) and again 128 KB/s upstream. This is a nice change for us, although I am aware other users didn't have such a cap.
Also, @home previously offered webspace with each account, which was 10 Mb. Now it seems they have modified their service to include 60 Mb of webspace, I never used this feature before, but have activated it now in anticipation of a backup site for my regular page. As of yet their "df" command in the web-based control panel still says I have 10240 Kb free, but I'm assuming that's either a limitation of the webpanel, or they haven't upgraded the servers yet.
Additionally, their user management page is -completely- redesigned, making itself much more intuitive, and helpful, not to mention easy to use. I attempted to get an e-mail address with our @home service, but it had been taken by someone else previously, and then deleted, rendering it unusable because AT&T won't reactivate e-mail accounts after they have been deleted. However, with the switch, all the "dead" e-mail addresses are now available, and I was able to successfully activate my preferred address. On the same note, we were previously allowed 7 total fixed addresses, but now we are only allowed 5 simultaneous addresses, I say this is a good thing though, because before when you deleted an address, you didn't get credit back to create any more, but now you can "rename" a user account, so I renamed my old one, to the desired username without changing the number of e-mail's we're using. The @home service limited the password length on accounts to a maximum of 9 characters, and a minimum of 6, this was -very- limiting. The new attbi service allows the standard 8-16 character password, which is very handy.
Overall I am pleased with our change in service, and although other people have experienced DNS, and login errors, I had zero issues with the change-over, and can only hope, in my case at least, it is a permanent change. My loss of a domain is hardly earth-shattering, and as far as I know, once attbi gets stabilized, their IP's will again become semi-static like it was before. I can't speak for others, I know some people in California who once used @home and are now on juno. My transition was smooth, and my service has gone from pretty good to even better. But as they say, YMMV.
Score 1: Repetitive Information Fodder
The minus is we lost our static IP address, which means we can't let it leak through the firewall to VPN into work anymore -- now we're back to physically bypassing the firewall to work from home.
The plus -- and it's a big one -- is the new Subscriber's Agreement. Under @Home we were not allowed to run a "server" -- any server. They did not allow http or ftp or anything else. ATTBI say:
In other words, if you run an FTP server and someone downloads your files, it's your problem not theirs. In other words, they don't care! They also say:But that also means you can use dynamic DNS to associate a host hame to your dynamic IP for non-commercial purposes. Way cool -- I like that a lot!But I'm bummed at losing the static IP. And myname@Home sounded better than myname@ATTBI. I just hope that I'm not forced to switch to AOL or MSN next month.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
FWIW -- In our area (Richmond, VA), they've been spreading the word that there won't be any downtime. Since AT&T is starting with the northwest in creating their own network, I didn't want to believe them (even though their e-mail assured me their one goal is to provide us with great service -- yeah, right).
There was a story on the evening news today that explained what was happening. For those AT&T customers who were Mediaone customers (a company that actually cared about customer satisfaction before AT&T bought them!), AT&T is using the old Mediaone net -- they never changed those regions over. In other words, if you were a Mediaone customer, you were never on the Excite net and yoru service should remain intact.
--WH
good thing you gave your email adress, dumbass, or, should I say, chaz@fuckoftheweek.com ?
Um, well, first... that press release doesn't say that everyone is back on-line... in fact, it's a release from Saturday. Here, it's Tuesday. Can Hemos read??
Second, since I am an ATT Broadband customer in Chicago, sitting here dialed in using a 56k modem, I can assure you that ATT customers are *not* all back on-line. Contrary to the attitude in SF, the bay area does not constitute the entire world...
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun, with Coca-cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.
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
P.S.
My AT&T@Home came back up two days ago (Seattle).
These guys paid $785M for BlueMountain.com. I kid you not, and the bond holders financed this idiocy. Had they spend money on making a decent Internet "Dial-tone" they would have been in excellent shape. Instead they redesigned their website over and over making it worse and worse. They never understood that most users couldn't care about all their "value added stickyness" stuff. Look at google they are the most Sticky website I know precisely because they know what business they are in. No need to switch to DSL the ILECs are as corrupt as AT&T. Recently SBC lied on their filing to get LD service in Arkansas. They were fined $3.3M, they will make 100 times that on the permission they got. So why tell the truth.
Help fight continental drift.
All in all, I'm pretty happy that it only took 2 days to get me back. Sure, it's 2 more days than I was hoping for, but it could have been a lot worse.
And that is because...? Btw dumbass, you spelt it wrong in your link. Please carry on licking my nutsack.
Cox Press Release
r up tion.asp
http://www.cox.com/pressroom/No%20Service%20Dis
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2001
COX COMMUNICATIONS ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT TO AVOID DISRUPTION OF COX@HOME INTERNET SERVICE
Pact Ensures Residential Cox@Home Customers and Business Customers Continue To Receive High-Speed Internet Access During Transition To New Cox-Managed Network
ATLANTA - Cox Communications, Inc. (NYSE: COX) today announced that it has reached an agreement that will allow the company's 555,000 Cox@Home customers and more than 20,000 commercial business customers to maintain Internet access through their broadband connections until the company transitions to its own high-speed network. The agreement is pending approval by Bankruptcy Court Judge Thomas E. Carlson.
Through the agreement involving Excite@Home, its creditors, and other cable companies, Excite@Home will continue to serve as Cox's supplier of high-speed Internet service while Cox rolls out its own managed network over the next few months. Under the terms of the agreement, Cox will pay $160 million to Excite@Home for three months of uninterrupted service for its Cox@Home subscribers. This amount will be in lieu of the monthly subscriber fees previously paid to Excite@Home.
Excite@Home filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September and subsequently was faced with a court ruling that threatened to disrupt high-speed Internet service for approximately 4 million residential cable customers, including those served by Cox. Some customers of Cox's commercial division, Cox Business Services, would also have been impacted. On November 30, a bankruptcy court judge approved a petition filed by Excite@Home giving it the right to terminate its service agreements and cease providing service to its cable affiliates and their customers. However, following Friday's ruling, Cox was successful in negotiating a new temporary agreement with Excite@Home so that service will continue for a brief period of time until Cox's new network is fully deployed and its Internet customers have been transitioned to a new Cox-managed service.
"We are pleased that all parties in this case reached an agreement based on the best interests of our customers," said Dallas Clement, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Development. "This agreement allows an orderly transition of Cox@Home customers to our own high-speed network without the fear of major service disruptions."
The agreement doesn't change Cox Communications' plans to transition its customers to the company's own nationwide high-speed Internet network. That transition will begin in December and will be completed, on a market-by-market basis, by March 2002.
"This agreement means we have been given time to transition our customers in an orderly fashion, without any prolonged service outages or e-mail disruptions," said Pat Esser, Executive Vice President of Operations. "Establishing our own network will give us more control over the quality and reliability of service, the ability to add new features, and allow us to be more responsive. Our new system will be based on the most advanced technology and will be supported by Cox technicians and service representatives who will monitor all aspects of the service and quickly resolve any technical issues. Ultimately, our own network will allow us to provide an improved customer experience, which will increase customer loyalty and attract new customers." Cox Communications currently offers high-speed Internet access through Excite@Home in 18 markets. In addition, Cox provides high-speed Internet access to an additional 230,000 customers under the brands RoadRunner and Cox Express. These customers also will transition to Cox High Speed Internetsm service later next year. Cox Business Services Internet customers will simultaneously transition to the Cox-managed data network.
About Cox Communications:
Cox Communications, a Fortune 500 company, serves approximately 6.2 million customers nationwide, making it the nation's fifth largest cable television company. A full-service provider of telecommunications products, Cox offers an array of services, including Cox Cable; local and long distance telephone services under the Cox Digital Telephone brand; high-speed Internet access under the brands Cox@Home, RoadRunner and Cox Express; advanced digital video programming services under the Cox Digital Cable brand; and commercial voice and data services via Cox Business Services. Cox is an investor in telecommunications companies including Sprint PCS and Excite@Home, as well as programming networks including Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel. More information about Cox Communications can be accessed on the Internet at www.cox.com.
About Cox Business Services
Cox Business Services is the commercial broadband division of Atlanta-based Cox Communications, Inc. A full-service, facilities-based provider of telecommunications solutions, Cox Business Services serves home offices; small, medium and large-sized businesses; school districts; and hospitality, government and military properties in cities across the nation. Cox offers high-speed Internet services; switched voice services and long-distance; wholesale carrier access; and dedicated voice, data and video transport services. More information about Cox can be accessed on the Internet at www.coxbusiness.com.
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
Yep... AT&T didn't want to pay them $100million just to get 50% of thier customers connected for 1 week... and i wouldnt either..
Cox is the other MSO cable co. in that "3-way deal", they paid excite (along with comcast) 160million for the next 3 months... after those 3 months, they'll have all thier customers up and running on thier own cox run network.
personally I can't wait...
interesting note though:
$160 million over 3 months is $53 mil a month, $1.7mil a day..
last i heard, cox and comcast has a little under a million @home customers each.. (call it a mil for easy calc's) that's $53+ per subscriber, per month.. and they only charge $35-49 per month??? the MSO's are getting BONED in this deal... but excite had thier nuts in a sling. they had to go along with it...
but it's good to see those companies who would rather lose some money and actually watch out for thier subscribers than to take the easy way out.
Of course, all of this could be worse. My comcast connection did not die at all. Of course I wasn't home on Friday, but when I was on Saturday, it was fine. But I did get a very strange thought. What if Microsoft got hold of @home? Would that not be scary to have @MSHome or @MSNHome? I think I would kill my cable connection right then and there. And of course, they probably wouldn't support linux (Comcast said they do and I have my Slack 8.0 box running on it through static IP).
%blow
%blow: No such job
^how did the sex change go?
Modifier failed
Broadband - it's dead as disco.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I was pleasantly surprised that my internet service (att@home) was not interupted at all here in portland oregon, but i seem to be having DNS problems... after about 10-20 minutes of browsing the web, suddenly all sites that i try to go to that i havent been to yet, cant be found. tihs happens on my mac and pc and its really irritating. the only thing to do is either wait a while or restart the computer.
anyone else experiencing this, and have a fix?
Joseph?
The Hartford Courant said that AT&T was expecting service to be restored to this area on Thursday.
-Jennifer
Agreed, slashdot really needs to actually get some editors that know what facts are and fabricated information is.
...
example
We reacted quickly. Customers had been notified earlier that this might occur. In Michigan an auto-dialer started calling customers at 9:00 AM Saturday and an e-mail was sent to Minnesota customers. 700 additional call-center resources were brought on-line around the country to help answer customer inquiries. Calls were 300% over normal loads and customers overflowed into the Minnesota call-center and inbound sales. Although many calls were received, call center personnel reported that most were courteous and simply in search of additional information.
AT&T told excite to stuff it and their extra crappy service. AT&T is lighting up a broadband solution that has been engineered basically overnight by the best and brightest that cisco and AT&T has.
This is possibly the best thing to ever happen to AT&T, and the fact will shine through over the next few months.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yesterday I had several friends call me and ask how my service was doing.
Well, it sucks. Currently my modem has been set to a 128Kbit max upload/download. for those doing the math that is ~= a 56K modem's speed.
Seriously, I understand the don't want to get flooded, but this is ridiculous. I started a download last night that would take about 2 hours, normally. 14+ hours later it was still not done and had crapped out, to boot.
Apparently charter has a 30, 40 and 50 dollar service. What the difference is, god only knows, but I'm on the phone now trying to find out.
I realize I'm probably rambeling on, but, to see Comcast and AT&T getting 1.5M down...damn, I want to cry.
This whole affair has left me absolutely livid.
I absolutely hate the current litigous society we live in, but, "Class action/Consumer Fraud" and other types of law suits leapt up in my mind.
I'm seriously considering some form of action to light a fire under a few asses here locally to do something.
One word summation of all this: "Arrrruuuuggghhh!!!"
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Being a Comcast@Home customer, I have been watching this quite closely, since it seemed that Comcast didn't have a backup plan. The math here though doesn't work out. Comcast has 850,000 customer according to various news reports. At $32/month, that's $27.2M in gross income, or $81.6M over three months. They paid double their gross income to keep us as customers for three months? When do my rates go up?
So, how long have you worked for AT&T?
I'm never satisfied with anything when it comes to connections or bandwidth or anything. But the service under @Home was as close to perfection as it gets. Consistant 1.5Mbps downs, if not higher off peak, and better than 128 up, always. In two years, I lost service for 8 hours. Then AT&T pulls the plug for 6 days on purpose?
Wait, now it sounds like I work for @home... Bah, forget it.
As far as I'm concerned, AT&T can suck me AND the horse I road in on.
It may be unpopular to praise your broadband provider but I'm going to seriously miss @home when I'm finally switched over to Comcast's own network.
With all the talk of download caps as low as 768K on the ATT network, I realize how spoiled I've been. My download speeds are often 2.4Mbits or greater. On a speed test website, I tested 7x faster than my neighbors Verizon DSL service (basic level).
Comcast@home was an excellent deal at $39.95 per month. I'll be sorry to see it go.
Had to deal with the up again down again service from AT&T for quite some time now, best way to cope with it (90% of the problems have been in the WAN/Modem/AT&T's screwed up networking) is to hit that little reset button in back of the modem... This forces the modem to reestablish the link to their WAN and get a fresh IP... In the meanwhile, their DNS appears to have been restored, so no more relying on their DHCP (my roomy can now access webpages/non-IP addresses over Sygate), well, for however long they can keep it up... It's looking like the last time it went down here was due to their installing their DNS routing hard/software or whatever IT guys do... Pity it took them this long to get it done, considering they had as early as second quarter reports to figure out that @home was going tits up... Ohwell...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
From the broadband.att.com support site:
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.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Hmm, AT&T is basically putting up a new backbone for all of its subscribers, creating a short term inconvinience for permanant long term stability... Hmmm, it might create jobs too. Quit bitching and look at the big picture... or just go to AOL.
Last night I was switched from @Home to Adelphia Powerlink. It's working just fine this morning, and a bit faster. I feel sorry for those stuck on @Home for 3 more months.
Has anyone heard news about Microsoft's position in all of this?
I heard this morning on Fox News that M$ may be trying to buy into the network... but I can't find any more info on the web.
So, how long have you worked for AT&T?
So, how long have you worked for @Home? Might want to look for a new job.
I'm never satisfied with anything when it comes to connections or bandwidth or anything.
You still have your horse.
Consistant 1.5Mbps downs, if not higher off peak, and better than 128 up, always.
You must have been a novice at cable modems. There is a simple hack that would give you 1.5M both ways.
You sir are a liar. Good day.
http://www.not@home.com
It was definitely offline as of last night, but today I notice I can trace to my default route (24.2.176.1) from my office (which is connected via UUnet). Not sure yet if this means it's up; know for sure in a few hours.
Now that @Home is gone, this is a good time to suggest the introduction of a little more honesty in the business. How about telling us which cities are capped and what the limits are. How about a list of the addresses, ports, and newsgroups that are being blocked, instead of having the customers reverse-engineer the knowledge for themselves? It's not like we don't know this is happening!!! They can either "face the music" from the customer community or just let them bad-mouth the service in private to people who are thinking about signing up. Pick one.
I'd like to see them use and RBL-like service on e-mail, and it would be nice if they could get the packet loss under 5%, but for now I would be happy to just get basic connectivity back while I consider my options long-term.
I'm willing to accept the cap, at least temporarily. What's really helping my relations with AT&T right now is that my ping times are significantly better. I can always wait a little longer to get a file, but ping times are rather time critical.
I do wish, though, that if I'm going to get 1/4th the speed I had before that AT&T would at least up my upstream cap to 384k. At least then I'll be able to update my website faster.
"Derp de derp."
Here is the email that I received from Insight regarding their Insight@Home service (provided by Excite@Home):
Early this evening, Insight, along with other cable operators (including Cox, Comcast, Mediacom, and Rogers) signed an interim agreement with Excite@Home and the official unsecured bondholders' committee. This settlement agreement provides for continued service for three months, during which time we can accomplish an orderly transition to another high-speed provider.
The specific terms of the deal include a lump payment by the cable operators of $355 million, $10 million of which is Insight's portion. We agreed to pay this fee in order to extend the time required to ensure an orderly transition. This payment will not result in a price increase to you.
We're also actively continuing our discussions with other high-speed broadband providers. The offering of new providers will be the first step in opening up our network to bring more choices to our customers in the selection of their Internet Service Providers, fulfilling our vision of our broadband platform.
While today's settlement agreement is subject to court approval, we expect this approval shortly.
We have worked hard to ensure continued, uninterrupted broadband service for you and we're pleased it appears that effort has been successful. We appreciate your ongoing support of Insight.
Sincerely,
Kim D. Kelly
Chief Operating Officer
Insight Communications
line I retrieved the new DNS entries with
ipconfig
Thanks for all the information posted on
But you don't have to restart your Machines.
If you actually READ the press release, you'll see it says the exact same thing quoted in a /. story yesterday. That is, that they've moved /some/ customers, and the transition is expected to be completed in "2 to 10 days". In the meantime, I'd make a stronger statement than the press release, and say that everyone else WILL (not "may") experience a "service interruption".
Ironically, as the dateline on the press release indicated, AT&T Broadband is based in Englewood, CO, but most of @Home's Colorado customers are still without service (I live in Denver).
My cable modem sync'ed up around 11am local time. So far, so good -- mail is working, don't need to use a proxy for http anymore (not that we needed to in the past), and usenet is working through netnews.attbi.com. Downloads seem a bit slower, but not outrageously so -- still well worth the $45/month.
There was a welcome letter in my new ATTBI mailbox, pointing to a new user's webpage, which had a nice "just give me the %$#@! settings" section for e-mail, http, nntp, etc.
The Denver Post is reporting on speculation the Microsft wants to invest $3 bilion to $5 billion in AT&T if the division goes it alone. (AT&T is considering selling off its broadband division. Bidders include AOL, Comcast, and Cox.)
--
If R is the set of all sets which don't contain themselves, does R contain itself?
Service in Denver still hasn't been restored. I would change - but the only valid competition here is Qwest DSL. Which bad service do I want?
I'm still waiting in State College, PA. There has been rumors of adephia taking over.
- about me
The headline implies that AT&T struck a deal with excite, the linked articles do not say this and all other evidence continues to be that AT&T is moving its customers to a new network.
Am I reading this wrong? We've just gotten back online here in Chicago, and it sure ain't @home service!
... sucks.. no warning.. and 7 days is too much...
So, who will get the home.com domain?!? If everyone is moving to their own networks? I think I'll start an e-mail farm to keep people's @home e-mail accounts live... Charge the new broadband companies to access the new accounts... Phil
It's good that I can't see my neighbors in the boradband network, but I can't even see my roomate anymore! The DHCP server is assigning addresses with different default gateways and subnet masks to me and my roomate. Argh.
-Brian
"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness." -Robert A. Heinlen
I'm tired of reading about people who claim that anyone upset with the 1.5 Mb cap are 13 year old whiners.
To review:
Opps. Why did the "tab" key submit my comment?
Anyway, to start over:
1) With @Home I paid $46/month and I got 3.7 Mb down.
2) With ATT, I'm going to pay the same amount of money for 1.5 Mb, which from reports isn't even being attained.
So, I'm paying the same and getting a lot less. Plus, previously the user agreement said I could run a low-traffic, personal server. ATT says no servers of any kind. Granted, no one is probably going to bother me about a web server that gets less than 15 hits a day and transmits less than 200 Kb per day, but that's still annoying.
How would you feel if your auto leasing company came and swapped your Lexus for a Toyota and told you that the Toyota was as good as anything else you could get at that price?
The fact that there aren't better options doesn't mean that the cap doesn't suck.
In any event, I was able to get a different phone number that actually does connect with a tech (by calling sales who transferred me) -- that number is 866-447-7333. This might just be the number for my region, though. In any event, you can talk to an actual person if you have questions.
Lastly, the guy I talked with told me it could be 14 days from day of disconnection, at the latest, before service is restored. Even though I'm pretty impressed with how quickly AT&T has been able to effect the transition to their own network, I'm still expecting I'll have to wait the full 14 days, given that they don't even bother to list my state in their releases.
Oh well. As good a time as any to rebuild the server, I guess.
- Jonathan
"Are you serious?
;-)
Oh my god.
I could have made a shitty web site just like that for much less "
Don't you remember a company that paid 1bln for a website called slashdot.org?
The thing is that these outrageous sums were part of the game these times. Worthless companies were buying other worthless companies with their potentially worthless stock.
I don't think they have wasted much cash on BlueMountain (I might be mistaken though).
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I am in the San Francisco Bay Area and was down Saturday, Sunday and back online late Monday. I thought AT&T owned the infrastruture but @home handled the billing and help stuff and the web sites. So how did @home pull the plug unless its just the dns servers and some basic infrastructure interconnects.
AT&T told us in a letter to save email daily but AT&T seemed to migrate the to new email servers with the same password. I wonder about that too. Did they just re-ip these servers or set up new ones. Lots of question huh?
By the way, the deal for AT&T to buy @home fell through. AT&T terminates pact to buy ExciteAtHome assets
> And the "no server" rule is in the top four FAQs.
:-) Not that it matters, with the new dynamic addresses, servers are somewhat less useful. :-(
Correct, but my Port 80 still isn't being blocked.
I got a call last night from Mediacom, apparently they were calling customers en masse to inform them that they'd reached an agreement and service would continue uninterrupted. And it did (at least until today when someone dug up the cable).
But I also received an interesting piece of news. In my state (Iowa) AT&T had been collecting sales tax, and now they were informed that those taxes were not required. So they're giving everyone a credit sometime in 3 or 4 months from now. Or you can send a form to the State tax board and get a refund immediately (well, immediately in bureacratic terms, probably a month or two). My tax refund will be over $70. Now if I can just get my other ISP to stop charging sales tax!
I happened to read this article, as well as one in the Chicago Tribune this morning. While Comcast DID reach an agreement with @home, AT&T did *NOT*. AT&T will have most of their network up (using AT&T WorldNet) TODAY, and everyone else by the end of the week.
I'm in Westmont- western Chicago suburb.
I just got online to a tech after only a couple of minutes! Direct number; 1-866-706-8818
I have a blinking cable light, no DNS when I do an ipconfig/all.
Got the phone message today that service was back up. (not mine! They should have included the tech phone number. Thanks to a
Suggestions from the tech (I'm on my work 'puter now):
1) do a release all/renew all
2) go to the network identification. REPLACE the old id (probably something like CHG83KI) with your *last name* (!!)
3) replace the workgroups with: attbi
4) release/renew again
5) hope that works
So that's the info I have now, will try it tonight, will swear a lot if it doesn't work.
Tech was pleasant and as helpful as could be- have to give credit where credit is due. Of course, every other aspect of this has totally sucked. Especially the bill that I mailed today.. I can't WAIT to call billing and complain when they don't credit me for enough days... -Jenny
Good, then the product was working.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Where did you get yours?
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics