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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.
Try NOT@HOME!
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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."
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
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.
Well, I had the same problem -- my SMC router wasn't working. I called tech support, and after an hour on hold, they asked for my computer's Mac address. I gave them the router's Mac address. Things still didn't work, so they transferred me to the "next level" of support. While on hold, I typed winipcfg in my Windows box's Run menu, and set the computer itself to release/renew it's address. Then I restarted the computer and suddenly it was working. I tried the other computers -- didn't work, like the router was busted. I restarted each computer, and they all began working. So best bet: do a "release" through your router, then reboot it, then do a release/renew on your windoze boxen, then restart every computer.
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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
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.