AT&T Ends Bid To Buy @Home Assets

thumbtack writes: "In the neverending story of the @home saga it's being reported (on the Excite Portal which is not going under) that AT&T has broken off their bid to purchase Excite@home assets. They cite a number of significant contractual breaches and other violations by the bankrupt broadband Internet access company. In another related story Comcast and Cox say they have inked separate $160 million dollar deals to continued service while they develop their own networks. AT&T say that as of Tuesday morning they have moved 500,000 of their subscribers over to their network."

Comments

huh?

[cvd6262]

AT&T say that as of Tuesday morning they have moved 500,000 of their subscribers over to their network.

Whose subscribers to whose network?

Re:huh?

[Lumpish Scholar]

AT&T say that as of Tuesday morning they have moved 500,000 of their subscribers over to their network.

Whose subscribers to whose network?

AT&T@Home's customers to AT&T Broadband (the attbi.com thing).

Re:huh?

[AxelBoldt]

I don't understand what is going on at all. What exactly does (did?) Excite@home own? Did they do business with At&T, or with consumers directly? What is AT&T@Home? And At&T Broadband is presumably the cable TV operation of AT&T?

Re:huh?

[M-G]

I don't understand what is going on at all.What exactly does (did?) Excite@home own?

Excite@Home was a combined company that ran the Excite portal, and the @Home ISP.

Did they do business with At&T, or with consumers directly?

With AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Charter, and a number of other cable companies.

What is AT&T@Home?

AT&T@Home was @Home service provided through AT&T to their broadband customers

And At&T Broadband is presumably the cable TV operation of AT&T?

Yes, along with digital phone service and internet access.

Think of @Home as an ISP, like Mindspring, AOL, or whatever. Think of the cable company as the phone company. With a standard dialup ISP, you use the phone company to connect to your ISP. With high speed cable access, you used your cable provider for a dedicated connection to @Home's service.

If you decide to change dialup ISPs, you change the number you dial. In this situation, the cable companies are unplugging their connection to @Home, and plugging into a different provider's network.

Re:huh?

[tenman]

AT&T owns a high speed cable network. @Home was set up to provide Account Administration,Billing services, customer support, and content. There are more things that @Home provided, and there are sub categorys of the things that I've listed here. One of the most important things IMHO was mail/news/web/etc servers for thier customers. @Home was a service provider, and AT&T was the VAR, or Delivery guy, or what ever...

Re:huh?

[Lumpish Scholar]

I don't understand what is going on at all. What exactly does (did?) Excite@home own? Did they do business with AT&T, or with consumers directly? What is AT&T@Home? And AT&T Broadband is presumably the cable TV operation of AT&T?

Foo@Home (for any Foo) was the combination of Foo, the cable company, making sure your cable to the Foo office can be used for IP (and that you got billed for it), and Excite@Home, making sure there was IP connectivity from Foo to the Internet. (I don't know where the line of demarcation is between the two organizations.)

AT&T already has an organization that provides IP connectivity to the Internet for home customers: AT&T WorldNet Services.

The trick is getting the AT&T (formerly TCI) cable offices connected to AT&T's existing IP infrastructure.

AT&T (and Cox) had been working on this for a while, knowing a crisis was coming to a head.

Re:huh?

[Grit]

Excite@Home got started as @Home, an ISP specializing in cable modem service. (They provided the Internet connectivity, DHCP, proxies, web caches, servers, etc. for the cable companies.) Later they merged with Excite to add a "portal" (and other content) to their business, hoping to turn into the next AOL.

Perhaps the clearest way of putting the business arrangment (as it looked from the customer end, anyway) was that @Home's Internet service was distributed by AT&T. The combination of cable modem + Internet services is what gets labeled "ATT@Home", just like the same arrangement with Cox cable is "Cox@Home". AT&T was basically just in the business of hooking up subscribers to @Home's network; I paid ATT a subscription fee, then they turned around and gave part of it to @Home.

ATT Broadband is the name they've been using all along for their cable business, although now it seems to mean digital phones, too. But the intricacies of their internal arrangements escape me...

Bye Bye Excite!

[sterno]

Well, sounds like excite is acting as nothing more than a stop gap measure for the remaining users of it's service until they can get their own networks up and running. So it's safe to say that excite@home will not be an ongoing concern in a few months. Will anybody really notice though?

Re:Bye Bye Excite!

[amuro98]

Well, I'll certainly notice a drop in spam that uses an @excite.com return address.

Re:Bye Bye Excite!

[freeio]

Here (Huntsville, Alabama) we have two competitive cable companies, and last week when I saw what was about to transpire I called Comcast's competitor (Knology) to see what was available. Surprise! The bundle I needed cost 30% less with the competitor, so I signed up, and the installer came today. The transition was flawless, and bringing up the new link took nothing more than a simple ifdown, linuxconf, ifup sequence to have the firewall/router back up.

As soon as it worked, I called up Comcast, cancelled, and personally took their modem and dropped it off at their office. Well, this evening we got a call from a seemingly desperate Comcast sales lady who desperately wanted to know why, since it was still working, that we would bolt.

My answer was this: I cannot afford downtime, period. The deal negotiated between Comcast and E@H is a tentative thing, and under the circumstances, the bondholders may reject it and demand that the case be transferred immediately into chapter 7 liquidation. Why? Taxes! The game is over, and they want their tax loss writeoff as soon as possible.

The bankruptcy judge in some ways has "godlike" powers, and indeed may not let there be a 90 day transition. He has no duty to the customers whatsoever. His is basically a fiduciary duty, in which the customer is a non-entity.

90 day transition? I wouldn't bet on it.

Why require a test?

[sweetooth]

We'll still have just as many morons on the Net as we have morons on the roads.

Re:Why require a test?

[Moonshadow]

Easy test:

Step 1: Press Alt-F4 to start the test.

Step 2: If you can read this, you passed.

Only hurts bondholders

[bstadil]

This only hurts the @home bond-holders. The guys that convinced the bankrupcy judge that it was better to leave 4M+ accounts without internet connection then weaken thier bargaining position. Could happen to nicer people. I never understood the rationale for the Poker game they played.

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[Anonymous Coward]

I never understood the rationale for the Poker game they played.

It's really quite simple, and elegant. Firstwith, the bond holders, under most states' property rights laws, and under the federal Chapter 11 proceedings for Corporations at Interest, must first announce their intentions to consider the bond debt unassumable (actually, the latin term is Pro Caveat.

After the court approves the declaration, it is then the fiduciary responsibility of the bond holders henceforth. By forcing a temporary shutdown of the service, the bond holders are demonstrating their use of the fiduciary responsibility, and thereby demonstrating reasonable cause in their operation and protection of the asset (the asset being the network operation not the network itself).

It is obvious that this will always produce the correct outcome by fiat. It clearly forced AT&T's hand, and exposed them as a illiquid bidder.

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[Grit]

It doesn't seem to have hurt them _too_ badly. The $320 million combined that the two other cable companies are paying is about what ATT was offering for a buyout. But I agree, it was a stupid move.

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[aka-ed]

This only hurts the @home bond-holders

I wonder. Can someone-anyone explain how ATT's offer to buy out Excite at 300 million can exist in the same world as Comcast's 44.5 billion offer to buy AT&T broadband?

The cable companies, particularly ATT, controlled excite. They drove it into the ground. And now one of them is going to snap it up at a bargain price, and will not have to take on any of the debt.

attbi has something like $12 bilion in debt that Comcast is willing to take on.

Various cable companies are vying to pay $3500-4000 per subscriber for attbi. Cnet says that is a "reasonable valuation" in the purchase of a cableco.

No one is willing to pay anything like that price for @home customers, even without the debt. Four million broadband users are not worth even $100 each?

Feh. The whole thing stinks of "cartel."

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually use the word "feh" in public.

How cute.

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[Anonymous Coward]

In the event Excite@Home violates their contracts the cable companies inheret the customers anyway.

AT&T waited to switch customers over till AFTER Excite cut them off. Which was a violation of contract which gave AT&T the right to switch them over. Rogers & Shaw in Canada had the right to switch customers over as they had different contracts. (And Shaw made it clear 10 months ago they would be.).

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[filbo]

This analysis is totally wrong. Right now @home is a company without customers. Yes, they are going to get money from Cox and Comcast, but they are also going to have to continue operating the network, which means that they will have expenses that will dig into that $320 million amount. After those contracts expire, @Home is a business with no customers.

Right now, from a valuation point of view, I can't see that @Home is worth anything more than the depreciated value of its equipment and its IP, whatever that may be. It has no future as a going concern.

And you can't compare @Home to attbi, because attbi is now the whole enchilada (i.e., cable lines and service network). @Home never had the physical lines into customers homes. That meant that attbi has 850,000 customers, but @Home only had a few (i.e., the cable customers). So the value of a cable company is utterly different than the value of @Home.

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[aka-ed]

Yes, but so did Otis Redding -- "Sad Song (Feh-feh-feh-feh-feh-feh"

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[aka-ed]

I may be a little confused about what, exactly, consitutes "AT&T Broadband." Since Media One and Road Runner are not in there, I figured ATT@Home was not.

I gather that AT&T Digital Cable customers are under that umbrella; and these would be the people provided by AT&T@home -- ne?

I was thinking that was a separate entity, but, on reflection, it seems that they would already have been in that mix.

still, $100 per user when the cust pays a $50 monthly fee seems radically slim. Moot now, as ATT has withdrawn.

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[aphrael]

Uh, no, it *also* hurts the 1700 @home employees who are basically getting screwed in the whole deal --- at&t pulls out, the people who were hoping to go along with the physical assets get dumped. They're the true victims in the whole game.

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[aphrael]

Yeah, but AT&T *built* the competing network in violation of *its* contractual obligations. All three companies saw the handwriting on the wall months ago and started building systems to replace @home, which was a good business decision on their part, but also a violation of their contracts with @home; expect the rump of the company to sue, and a nasty battle in the courts to ensue.

Re:Only hurts bondholders

[DarkHelmet433]

AT&T Broadband is a much more than attbi.com. Comcast's bid is for the entire cable TV, digitial phone, *and* attbi networks, including the actual cable on the poles and in the ground. That is a much much larger deal. Cable TV is far more profitable than a group of cable modem users anyway. That's why it is worth that much money as a whole. I dont know if AT&T Worldnet is part of AT&T Broadband or not, or where the MediaOne group fits into this.

Way to go shareholders...

[instinctdesign]

This is a great example for shareholders on how to screw yourself over. Frankly, I'll be happy when Comcast gets us all switched over to their own system.

Do the math

[Lumpish Scholar]

AT&T was going to pay $305M for the 75% of Excite@Home they didn't already own.

Comcast and Cox paid $320M for the honor of the lights turned out more or less gracefully.

Sounds good ... except Excite@Home (or the companies it owned money to) probably could have gotten up to $400M from AT&T. These are the same folks who thought Excite@Home was worth $1B, and who thought their fair cut of our $40/month payments was about $50/month. (They're getting about $95/month for the "three months, you're out" plan.)

Re:Do the math

[ciberbear]

You have to factor in the cost of continued operations though. It is not that simple. Me thinks, Excite is going to loose big time.
- da bear -

Re:Do the math

[brulman]

and Excite now has to pay to keep the network running for the next three months which will probably burn through most of the $320 million. AT&T had offered to absorb 300 employees and take $70 million in debt as well. Excite, their employees, AT&T, the customers AND the greedy bastard bondholders lose. what a bunch of assholes.

Re:Do the math

[Anonymous Coward]

That and the fact that @home still has to pay for any overhead/operating costs normally incurred in keeping their service running for those three months...

I personally will be thrilled to hear of @home closing their doors for good.

Re:Do the math

[cmowire]

I suspect that the Comcast and Cox deal made sense because the @Home people figure they can liquidate their assets for more than $80M.

It was likely a good bet. AT&T could have blinked and paid up for more than $400M.

Re:Do the math

[ciberbear]

Oooh, I forgot - I am one of the those ATT customers that were cut off. My experience with Excite? - what a crappy customer service that was and how restrictive and intrusive they were. I'm happy to be away from them.

Re:Do the math

[jordandeamattson]

In bankruptacy proceddings, there is a big difference between creditors and "owners" (which includes shareholders). AT&T only owned 25% of Excite@Home, but had a 75% voting interest in Excite@Home (due to difference classes of stock). What they wanted to do, was to purchases the assets of Excite@Home for $305M plus the assumption of a some of the debits (essentially the leases).

Of course, what the bond holders - the creditors - have gotten out of this deal is a lot less than what AT&T offered. Yes, they are getting $320M for keeping the service up for three months, but they will easily burn through much of this money keeping the service running. In addition, the leases are still in place and take precedence over the bond holders. In the end, they will probably get little, if anything when Excite@Home gets liquidity at the end of three months.

The bondholders bet that AT&T would blink, that they couldn't get a network up and running in the short amount of time in which they have done it. They have taken what was an asset that could have brought in $305M and reduced it to something that will probably get picked up by someone - who knows, maybe AT&T - for maybe $25M (remember high bid gets it, no questions about fairness) at the liquidition auction. These guys screwed themselves and how.

And AT&T has done a good job of under promising and overdelivering. They were telling us that it would be two weeks to get the service transferred. Well, here it is four days later (Saturday-Sunday-Monday-Tuesday) and we have our service back up. Yes, we were inconveniced; yes, it wasn't fun; but they have the service back up and runnning in a very short amount of time.

Re:Do the math

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding was that the cable companies were paying Excite $12/mo oer subscriber. When they went Chapter 11 the cable companies rased this to $20/mo. I have a friend that uses AOL on top of AT&T Broadband and this price is $10/mo to AOL. It looks to me as Excite was asking for an unreasonable chunk of the monthly funds (and they were looking for more than the $20)

Re:Great news!

[bozo42]

AMEN!!

And the federal Government will administer the test using Micro$oft software......

DOOOOOOH!!!

Was it worth it ?

[DennisZeMenace]

One wonders how valuable those assets really were considering it took AT&T about 5 days to switch most of their @Home customers to their own network...

DMZ

Re:Was it worth it ?

[SiriusRegalis]

Except you forget one thing...

ATT has their customers capped because their system can't handle the bandwidth. A cap that has been forced on customers who for the most part would have paid more to be without. (at least the 30 or so I've talked to, myself included)

If the network was worth so little, why were my downloads 20 or 30 times faster then they are now? I feel like I've been paying to drive a corvette, and now I'm still paying for that corvette but somebody welded the gear shift into 1st gear. ATT is basically leaving their customers with much lower service and acting like they're doing us a favor....

Re:Was it worth it ?

[DennisZeMenace]

Results may vary, I guess, but I'm not experiencing this at all. Even though most of the bay area former customerse have been switched already (i was switched sometime yesterday), my bandwidth has not been affected at all. I still have about 2 to 4 Mbps in download, and 128kbps in upload.

Even better, the latency is now considerably better. I use to have ping times of about 200ms from work to my home firewall/router, not it averages at 50ms!

DZM

Re:Was it worth it ?

[SiriusRegalis]

Well, Dallas was a big market for them, lots of new users and lots of infrastructure by the local companies put in place. I commonly ran at 13 to 20 Mbs, and that's why we went with @home. With 3 roomates all doing work from home (and playing online shooters) the bandwidth was well used.

The 1.5 cap is hard and fast here. And it has ALOT of people very upset (I work at a independent computer store and talk to people and it's the topic of the week)

Basically, almost eveyone I've talked to would be willing to pay 20 dollars or more a month if they could just get their bandwidth back... I wonder if ATT considered that? Or maybe offering a premium service? Hopefully they will in the near future because this cut has really affected our usage.

Re:Was it worth it ?

[avdp]

How about switching to DSL? No, I am not being an *ss I am serious! It seems that's the whole point of DSL - you pay more, but you have certain bandwidth guarantees. And the more you pay, the more bandwidth you get.

I have had two cable modems (currently Adelphia, and before that comcast@home) and I've NEVER gotten the kind of bandwidth you're describing. I always thought that was fine, I pay a lower fee than DSL and get more than enough bandwidth - but then again, I don't share my connection with 3 roomates - but then again, unless you were paying for the additional IPs, you're not supposed to do that anyway :)

Re:Was it worth it ?

[jonathan_ingram]

So what do you pay for the 1.5Mpbs service you're complaining so much about? Over here in the UK it's £40-50 ($60-70) a month for 512 down / 128 up.

Re:Was it worth it ?

[SiriusRegalis]

What I or you pay is not the issue... It's ATT claiming they are doing me a favor when they are not.

I quote "Lightning fast download speeds" when by comparison they are not. This is not the service I signed up for. I spent quite a bit of time in research and talking to reps on the phone because we needed specific service and speeds. @home provided that.

Now ATT is acting like the @Home service wasn't worth the money. But from a customer's point of view it was worth even more. It all comes down to profits, which everything does in business. It's merely a case of extreme profits versus lower profits... still profit though. When having to have your cake and eat it to becomes "and I'll eat everyone else's" is when i have an issue with business. If the customer is prioritized as high as you profit margin, that's when everyone is happy.

ATT is getting a customer base from a company that provided superior service and expecting everyone to accept it. It's their way or the highway... only because they want BIG WHOPPING margins, when a small hit to the profit would still be profit.

And still on top of that, we're willing to pay gladly, so profits don't have to even take a hit. Offer me a premium service, then cap those that don't need it or want to pay. People by expensive foreign cars when a cheaper car would do... why not the same here?

Re:Was it worth it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your arguments don't really make sense to me. Either way you've presented it you'd be being screwed by ATT - same uncapped service for a higher price, or a capped service for the same old price.

Your comparisons to the cars are off, too.. driving an expensive foreign car really fast doesn't limit other users speed. Using a lot of bandwidth on a cable network does. It's just not the same.

If you were screwed by anyone, in my opinion, it was the @Home service. They mismanaged everything, and then they ran out of money. That sucks, but that's the way it is - how would you be complaining if there was no ATT to easily pick up your service? Instead of that 1.5 cap (which is still pretty damn quick, although you share it with others) you'd have nothing.

Re:Was it worth it ?

[WannaBeGeekGirl]

ATT is getting a customer base from a company that provided superior service and expecting everyone to accept it

They may have provided superior service, but they went bankrupt too. That might be something to consider.

Re:Was it worth it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

THey had to scramble to get everyone switched over to a new network. After all they probably thought they had a good chance to pick up @home. My bet is once this is accomplished they will look at the bottlenecks and eventually throw more hardware at it to eliminate the bottlenecks. After all the cost of hardware is dirt cheap and they saved a bundle by not buying all that obsolete Excite equipment!

Re:Was it worth it ?

[rancher dan]

It's because you gentle folk are too civilized to riot from being bent over and rogered by, what is it, BT?

Re:Was it worth it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

And still on top of that, we're willing to pay gladly, so profits don't have to even take a hit.

Some how, I think if you saw the price of your actual bandwidth utilization, you wouldn't be willing to pay. It only works because there's 100 other e-mail types that hardly use any bandwidth at all and will never notice the caps.

BTW, one of the reason @Home went under was that they weren't managing their bandwidth costs.

But, by all means tell them that you are pissed that you aren't getting something for nothing anymore and move on to another provider that's giving away the store. Thought so.

Re:Was it worth it ?

[jonathan_ingram]

(your dig at BT aside, although I like the sentiment)

No, I think it's because we were missed out on the internet hype boom, so our providers are giving us the service at a cost *they* can afford. It's not as good a deal for the customers in the short term, but at least the connection shouldn't be going away in the medium term because of the company going bankrupt.

Re:Was it worth it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Superior service? Remember all the email problems? Guess who was responsible for those servers. ATHM management is idiotic, and *that* is why ATHM is bankrupt. AT&T did not want ATHM to fail, but ATHM was just too poorly run.

Re:Was it worth it ?

[filbo]

I think the main reason @Home had to file BK was not because of low level management problems like managing bandwidth costs. It was the high level management problems like structuring the company under a mountain of debt its revenue could not service.

Re:Was it worth it ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that AT&T was able to switch large number of subscribers to its network without much difficulty just shows how little value the @home network is worth, wasn't it suppose to be the most sophisicated design and their CTO Milo Medin the most gifted network engineer on earth... ha!
The company was so hyped up by Kleiner Perkins and George Gilder et al. it has no place to go but down, but those bastards probably sold early on and make a ton of money anyway...

Still no service

[slugfro]

"AT&T say that as of Tuesday morning they have moved 500,000 of their subscribers over to their network."

But I am not one of them!! As I have stated in my comments to the other @Home posts the last few days, I have still not been contacted in any form by AT&T regarding my loss of service either before or after the service was turned off. The lastest update on the AT&T website says that the Sacramento area should get service Wednesday of Thursday and that a representative will call when service is restored. We'll see if that really happens.

Now I can only read /. from work ;-/

Re:Still no service

[snubber1]

...Wednesday of Thursday...
Is that like Seven of Nine?

Re:Still no service

[slugfro]

uhhhh....uhhhhhh....I must have meant "Wednesday or Thursday". My darn eyes were spacing out again from staring at this cubicle wall!!

well

[waspleg]

comcast just sent me a letter confirming this, luckily i'm on time warner who even went so far as to give me a courtesy call this evening to make sure everything was still working, but i still have an @home email account.. however if my parents lose their access i'm sure it'll be up to me to provide a replacement so i guess i shoudl start trying to find dsl providers that don't suck ass in indy (hint; there are none)

Re:Great news!

[AstroJetson]

Seriously, there needs to be some sort of exam, like a driver's license, before people can get net access...
Not a bad idea, but who do you think would end up in charge of administering these exams? Yup, you guessed it, just another revenue stream for our friends in Redmond.

I think instead, there should be some sort of natural selection at work. If the lusers spreading Code Red and Nimda (not to mention Goner) were somehow made to pay for their transgressions, they might be motivated to learn how to be responsible netizens.

AT&T Welcome Page

[Anonymous Coward]

The new AT&T network seems to be getting better with every passing day, and today I can finally access most web pages without problem. Still, there are many cases where their "Welcome to AT&T Broadband Internet" message intercepts a site I am trying to go to, telling me to download their configurator or follow the manual instructions. Hmm, since I'm able to access that page, it would seem that I am already configured correclty, no?

I am using the AT&T DNS servers (though I have tried more reliable ones I know of) to see if they were somehow "implanting" their URL for hosts which couldn't be found (I tend to come up with crazy theories sometimes), yet this still happens. Does anybody know how to get AT&T to stop intercepting my pages?

Re:AT&T Welcome Page

[sublime]

They're doing it via their http://proxy:8080

Re:AT&T Welcome Page

[Anonymous Coward]

How so? I have not configured any proxy. Are they doing transparent proxying for HTTP (everything else just works dandy)?

Re:AT&T Welcome Page

[Anonymous Coward]

I got that intermittent interuption too...until I changed the configuration of my router to make "attbi.com" the domain.

Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think they really intended to continue with that offer. It was more of a "Don't anyone buy them, we want them to die" tactic.

The aftermath of this announcement can be viewed here.

*sigh*

//reflex

It only HURTS the consumer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only are at&t customers losin 25% of their bandwidth (1.5mbps from 3mbps) we're also losing aout email addresses - and without warning. I'm now user@attbi instead of user@home, which is fine and dandy, except that this is finals week and my profs were sending me things I NEEDED to know about. Thanks a whole fucking lot, at&t. You can say "you're welcome," to earthlink for me.

Re:It only HURTS the consumer...

[Anonymous Coward]

And you don't have a school provided e-mail address your profs use for class-related communications?

Re:It only HURTS the consumer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. I don't live on the campus... and... do you think I'd be bitching about this if my school gave me an email addy? Think about it, pal.

Re:It only HURTS the consumer...

[Skuld-Chan]

Well if you had been reading your e-mail from AT&T you would say that - I at least got 3~4 warnings in the last couple of months.

Re:It only HURTS the consumer...

[gekman]

Uhh, I'm guessing that you're not taking any math courses this semester.

Dropping from 3.0 mbps to 1.5 mbps is a _50%_ loss, not 25%...

Re:It only HURTS the consumer...

[yomegaman]

From your atrocious spelling and poor arithmetic I'm guessing you're a student at Iowa State. Am I right?

Re:It only HURTS the consumer...

[coyote-san]

I think you're the one who's off in left field here. When I was taking some graduate classes a few years ago, I had a school account... filled with incredible amounts of spam because of email harvesters. It didn't take long for me to abandon it and always give the professor an off-site address when the issue came up.

It's far easier to believe that you were doing something similar than that there's a college out there that isn't providing email accounts as a matter of course, even if they're not used.

Re:It only HURTS the consumer...

[Anonymous Coward]

there are still plenty of colleges, both 4-year and 2-year, which don't provide email accounts to students "as a matter of course". i've attended two of them in the last three years.

Why none of this matters.

[billybob]

The whole "no more excite@Home" thing doesnt mean anything. Oh, gee whiz, you mean I cant access their totally killer, @home-members-only, portal site anymore? Gosh, I'm depressed. Because I sure did visit that page a lot! Let me count the times.. one... one. The day i got cable modem. over 2 years ago.

I have a cable modem for the constant connection and the insane speed, not the internal content. I think they royally fucked up when they tried to do basically waht AOL does.

They paid nearly 7 billion dollars for excite a couple years ago. SEVEN BILLION DOLLARS. Does anyone realize how much money that is? Does anyone also realize what a waste of money that was? No one gets cable modem so they can use their shitty portal. If thats all youre going to do, you'd be fine with AOL. People get it for the speed and the constant connection. Imagine if @home had 7 more billion dollars right now. They probably wouldnt be in this situation.

So I could care less about what goes on between excite and at&t. were better off without excite. If this means at&t is 300 million dollars richer, maybe that will translate into less rate hikes in the future.

Re:Why none of this matters.

[Asgard]

Did they actually pay that much, or was it some sort of stock swap?

Re:Why none of this matters.

[niola]

LOL! Even funnier is that they spent like $800 million bucks to buy that Blue Mountain Arts greeting card site and recently sold it for like $20 million. Sheesh, I could have coded them up that site in perl for a few $k ;)

--Jon

Re:Why none of this matters.

[sien]

The deal for Excite was not that bad in some ways, when they bought Excite it had positive cash flow and was about number 3 or 4 in the portal game. The problem was that they synergy didn't happen.
Cringely wrote a good column about it months before all this happened.
His prognosis was also remarkably sharp, about how AT and T would come back and get the network, although it seems people are justifiably annoyed at their tactics.

Re:Why none of this matters.

[realdpk]

How much of that 7 billion dollars was in stock? Probably most of it. IOW, if they had that 7 billion dollars now, it wouldn't do them any good at all.

Re:Why none of this matters.

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct. It amazes me that folks like the root poster are still in dot-com utopia where people print money on stock certificates.

Excite _knew_ that the stock was grotesquely overvalued. That's the only reason the "valued at" price was so high.

AT&T & Static IP's

[Pika]

I had static IP's when AT&T was going through Excite.

Now that AT&T is on their own, it seems they have switched everything over to DHCP....

Has anybody had any luck getting static IP's (or extra IP's) through AT&T?

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Anonymous Coward]

I just used Win2000 DHCP, and used the IP numbers from ipconfig to plug into my linux firewall, then switched windows back to 192.168.0.3
Working fine for the past 2.5 days (Seattle)

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Anonymous Coward]

My cousin has had the same IP the whole time, even though it was DHCP. I was given a static one, so I'll just put that one in as static.

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[jon787]

Same type of situtation here in Grand Rapids, MI.
They claim the network is (or was seeing we don't have access restored yet.) DHCP, but my IP address has yet to change since we got the modem.

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Anonymous Coward]

You might also want to look at just using some sort of dynamic dns service such as www.ods.org , there are a bunch of other domains available from them as well as using your own private domain.

check it out, it may solve your dhcp problems.

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Monkeyman334]

Here in Washington, we had static IPs to start. Then we switched to DHCP, and were still on DHCP when excite@home cut them off. The thing is, they never reset their DHCP server, and I always had the same IP address. Now, I'm on a different dhcp server and likewise have a different IP address.

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

*sigh*, 192.168.x.x is private bandwith. that's not a real static ip (I get 4 STATIC for free with my dsl, and i'm upgrading to 8 for $12/month (3 roommates, and several servers))

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[/dev/trash]

Only hackers need static IP's

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Anonymous Coward]

Ive had a cable modem for like two years now with static IP. It started out as MediaOne, which was then bought out by AT&T.. although I have no idea exactly what service it was/is. I seem to have been unaffected by all this @Home junk, although my static IP changed a couple months ago, but has stayed put ever since

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Julian Plamann]

I am operating on the new at&t connection right now. My service is exactly the same as previous (besides hostname and IP. I have a static IP, so far as I can tell, 128kbps upload and uncapped download (just downloaded Linux-2.4.16 at about 400-500K/sec)
However, my connection has been dropping and re-connecting every few minutes since the switch. This is only noticable in sensitive programs like IRC. I'm sure this will go away once the new network has had a few days to stabilize.

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is: will it work after 5 days? (That's how long the DHCP lease seems to be good for, and I'm also in the Seattle area).
Interesting:
My BSD box via DHCP gets an IP from their server, repeated DHCP requests give the same IP (good for 5 days).
Windows DHCP gets an entirely different address (different network/subnet)!
Both work. For now I also just use the BSD box(router/firewall) hardwired with the "static" adress I got for it.

Another interesting note: Reached customer support and told them I have an old (MacOS 8) machine, since their newuser.attbi.com page said you could call them to "get network numbers" for such setups. Regardless, they said that it is not supported (even though I tried to explain that their website says so). I then said that I'll just plug in the numbers my "borrowed Win laptop" gets. They said: OK, that will make it work, but it will still be not static (?!). Obviously she had no clue, but I do wonder if these hardwired values will keep on working... We'll see.

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh* My static IP is 12.229.x.x. I took the IP addresses from DHCP (IP, gateway) and used them for the firewall.
My home network is 192.168.0.x.
I use the DNS IPs from ipconfig on the two machines behind the firewall

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, that's what he was saying. He got the IP # from his box when plugged straight into the cable modem. then he took those numbers and put them into his firewall so it new where to look, and put his box back into NAT'ed space...like I'm going to do right...now

New Provider name:

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's call it "@Homeless".

Re:New Provider name:

[KarmaBlackballed]

That is very close to the name these people already have...

http://www.lostbrain.com/notathome/index.html

Re:New Provider name:

[Anonymous Coward]

d00d--try this next time: <a href="url">text</a>, where "url" is the url you want to link to and "text" is the text you want to appear in place of the link.

And I do realize that '@home' is very close to '@homeless'--it's called humor. The moderators thought it was funny, hence the +5.

YMMV. HAND.

My aching ping

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I was "switched" over to a new network on Saturday morning. Since then my pings have gone to hell on my favorite online game. (avg ~150ms) I for one will miss those 50ms ping times to tribes servers.

The Spoiled LPB

AT&T did a resonable job

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in the San Francisco Bay Area and I was down on Saturday, Sunday but back online by Monday night. And my email account has the same password. Did they just scrub the disks and re-ip the mail servers. I wonder what the actual network switch was since AT&T owned most of the network already.

Re:AT&T did a resonable job

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, my login name isn't working...

At any rate, I'm bitter. I'm in Michigan. I'm one of the last to get reconnected. They say Thursday, but they also say 'some areas will have extended downtime'. I don't know what that means, but it sounds like, "If you don't live in a market with 10,000 connections per city block, don't expect to get reconnected."

Maybe that's wrong, but that's what it sounds like. It's unfortunate I don't live in the Bay Area, but I paid just as much for the service as any other user.

Re:AT&T did a resonable job

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you have to do anything to your computer in order to reconnect to ATT Broadband? The phone messge says to open your browser and you will be connected to ATT. Doesn't require any configuration changes? I can't get the Configurator program from ATT web site. Isn't that required. My @home connection was a static IP, so I switched to dynamic IP, I am still not able to get connected.

Thanks,
Bob D.

Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)...

[bwhaley]

... is still down as of about 30 seconds ago. I went down sometime early Saturday morning and haven't seen the light of day since. Instead I am dialing up to my campus network at about 19.2kbps since our phone line sucks so much. With companies like AT&T and Qwest you really can't win. I still prefer AT&T to Qwest anyday though...

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)...

[batboy78]

I'm not part of the AT&T crew but, I got switched over to Adelphia PowerLink this morning at about one, I went over to DSLreports to do the speed test, it seemed even better then before, but now, I am almost ready to go out and get a new modem, and dial-up account, I was downloading at 840bps. I hope these are just growing pains, I wonder how much Qwest DSL is?

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)...

[coyote-san]

I was told that we're scheduled to have our service back up on Thursday.

Of course, who knows how long it will take to get to noncompliant drones who aren't using Windows. We cause them too much trouble since we can't follow their predigested scripts (and I'm usually too busy to be willing to lie my way through endless Windows menus instead of taking 15 seconds to edit a text file and restart a server).

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)...

[Anonymous Coward]

Qwest SUCKS!!!!! Don't ever go with them. I had 6+ months of problems with them before I switched to AT&T. I will never buy another Qwest product again.

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in Boulder and have had somewhat spotty service this evening. Anyone having any problem getting to different url's? I can access some, but not all. Slashdot seems to come up only part of the time. Are you guys still working on DNS issues? It's 21:08 local time.

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)...

[bwhaley]

I am getting out just fine. Make sure to change from static to dynamic (if you were static before... you weren't supposed to be :). After I switched to dynamic it works fine, albeit a bit slow.

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)...

[coyote-san]

It depends on when you got your service. I was a very early adapter and probably more than a little intimidating, so I was given a static IP address just so they could close the ticket.

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)...

[coyote-san]

I'm running my own DNS server, and haven't had any problems since nuking the old 'forwarder' entries in my /etc/bind/named.conf file. This means I'm now always hitting the root name servers myself... a bit rude, but I don't see a lot of choices right now given the problems others are reporting.

Some other people are reporting similar problems. It seems to be caused by bad DNS servers being listed in the DHCP response - you can try each one separately, then put the good ones into /etc/resolv.conf yourself.

Re:we need regulation -- NOW

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a big ole negative there, ghostrider.

Home broadband is still a relatively new technology. Hell, ISPs in general are a relatively new industry. Do you think the utility companies didn't have their share of fuck-ups initially?

An AT&T broadband customer

[Anonymous Coward]

I was an Excite@Home customer and now AT&T has transitioned me to their network. It went pretty smoothly given the circumstances. I was basically down for two days and I can live with that. The networking changes required are minimal if you happen to use DHCP.

The only sore point is the change on my email address. I had that account for four or more years now and had mailing lists and such setup. It will take me a while to recover from that. The slight benefit is that atleast no spam for the past two days.

DNS. . . .

[Com2Kid]

You know, I wouldn't mind the bandwidth caps as long as they are temporary, and I can understand iffy service, but damnit;

DNS SERVICES ARE A TAD WEE BIT FRIGGIN CRUCIAL.

Bleh, darn thing is so friggin iffy, bleeeeh.

Also cannot upload to webspace account if you are not on a computer on the ATTBI network, darnit, there goes my file drop, heh. Signed up for a free one, bleh.

Back on the topic of DNS though, I suggest that people now take the time to switch over to one of the many alternative DNS providers out there are are free and give ya lots of nifty TLDs to play around with. :)

Re:DNS. . . .

[coyote-san]

Why are you using their DNS server?

Seriously, I long ago got tired of DNS servers "disappearing" because some bozo forgot (or never knew) that there were some systems set up for static IPs because their support people didn't want to deal with the odd Linux user... and without DHCP you don't get the new IP address for the name servers.

Once I had a basic DNS server running, I took immense pleasure in adding a few authoritative entries. Doubleclick? X10.com? They go straight to my web server (usually) where the browser returns a quick 404 error. Watching the status bar on the dialup line, I'm beginning to suspect that the good performance on my cable modem is as much due to local DNS server as the bandwidth. (For some reason the local server isn't working with the dialup line.)

AT&T still sucks...

[codewolf]

Here is a link to the migration timings for AT&T customers:

http://help.broadband.att.com/faq.jsp?name=srvc_av ailable_frmrtci

I am still without cable modem access, and without any other choice for a high speed connection.

As soon as I do have a choice, I'll be running away from AT&T. This debacle is AT&T's fault, they failed their customers, and should have had an immediate backup plan when this happened.

This wouldn't have happened. . .

["Zow"]

This wouldn't have happened if people didn't Dump broadband and dug out their modems. Sorry, just occured to me and I couldn't resist. If you didn't read the comments with the story, now would be a good time (it's worth a chuckle).

-"Zow"

Why not do some type of buyout?

[PoiBoy]

AT&T had been offering something in the $300-$400 million range to buy all the assets of @Home, and now Comcast et al. are paying $320 million to keep the network running for 3 months?

The numbers don't make sense. Either AT&T threw out an incredibly lowball bid, or the other cable companies are paying out the nose for continued service.

For this type of money, I'm surprised they don't buy the company outright either by themselves or perhaps by partnering with a private equity firm.

Re:Why not do some type of buyout?

[dhamsaic]

AT&T threw out an incredibly lowball bid. That's why they got axed and Cox & Comcast still have service. AT&T's offer was an insult - sort of like me coming up to you and saying "I'll give you $5 for that 1.4GHz Athlon system you got there..."

Re:Why not do some type of buyout?

[Anonymous Coward]

The AT&T offer should be compared to the profit that @Home could generate. The Comcast payment should be compared to revenue, not profit. If @Home took in $5 billion a month (made up number) and it cost them $4.999 billion a month then the $5 billion is compared to what Comcast is paying, but the difference, $1 million, is related to what AT&T was offering. So we really need to know what the potential profit potential is for @Home in order to compare the two numbers.

Re:Why not do some type of buyout?

[evildopey]

Actually, their lame offer for 307 million, compared to @Home's debts of around 1 billion didn't even come close to cutting it. *just to clarify the stupidity of AT&T* .. Reason I thought it was hilarious the first thing after the order comes through is "Aight. Unhook those smartasses at AT&T. let them deal with their customer".. Also amusing AT&T has "already" migrated 500,000 customers, when 850,000 were cut off. So when are they going to "migrate" the other 350,000 that don't have cable modem access? That's not migrating last time *I* checked.

Re:Why not do some type of buyout?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should AT&T pay more. The one billion dollar figure was probably based on original equipment purchase price. With the cost of equipment these days the $400 million was probably too much. The price probably included the time and manpower needed to move everyone off the network. Excite probably thought they could blackmail AT&T for more.

AT&T Now Working For Me

[CodingFiend]

My cable modem service had stopped working, got an automated call last week telling me that I should get another call at the end of this week telling me what's up.

I then signed up for a temporary dial-up account with a local ISP. By chance, I decided to try the cable modem, so I used IE's connection wizard. IE then opened a window containing setup information for the "new" AT&T (basically, changed DNS from specific servers to automatically find the DNS servers), and I now have my cable modem working again! I honestly didn't realize how painfully slow dial-up was until forced to use it!!

Re:AT&T Now Working For Me

[bstadil]

I am impressed, you must be the only guy that AT&T is working for ;-),
They look after themselves (quite badly I might add) and nobody else.

Re:AT&T Now Working For Me

[CodingFiend]

Hehe, I'm expecting the phone call on how to get back online in a few days :-) Glad I "discovered" how to by accident!

No surprise here

[SmittyTheBold]

Really, what would AT&T have to gain now? E@H is losing 50% or better of their user base in three months. They have lost a huge amount of money, and all AT&T would gain out of such a deal would be some additional infrastructure. So what? They're already well on their way to supporting all their users that used to be on @Home with their current infrastructure.

Not to mention the political side of it - Excite cut AT&T off, while the other companies remained connected. Pissing off a big company like that is not they way to convince them you're worthy of doing business with.

Re:we need regulation -- NOW

[jumpingfred]

Airline deregulation has been a tremendous success. It is cheaper to fly now than when airlines were deregulated many years ago.

Phone deregulation has also been great. It is much cheaper to call long distance now than before deregulation.

Several things to watch out for with the installer

[A_Non_Moose]

I've noticed the following:
1)I've had a shortcut (symlink, for you non windows folks ;) ) that was deleted by the installer.
It was, of course, called @home (news reader).
Good thing it was not a folder with data..phew.

2) I had made a "hard" association of vbs with notepad to avoid viruses (via winfile, so registry entries would not over write my association). The installer broke (or re-enabled it, if you prefer) that association.
Grrrrrr.

3) Outbreak^H^H^H^H^Hlook express 6 was installed w/o warning... and with the new virus floating around, not the brightest thing to do.

4) Exploiter^H^H^H^Hrer 6, same thing. Did not want it, did not need it, yet there it was.
K-Meleon, Netscape, or IE 5.x is what I'll use, sometimes in that order.

5) Something is not right with the installer, at least for me... kept getting "loadcw.exe page fault, blah, blah"...sigh.
5 1/2) Speed is still 8kbytes down, 12kbytes up, not cool, seeing as pipeline starts at 512down/128up... something is not right..heh...if only I could call them and get help...hahahahaha, yeah, right... that's funny. Maybe next week, or a visit to the "home" office here in town.

So far it works. But the best description of the current speeds has been deemed "as fast as a frozen slug". Heh, thanks to one of my cow-workers, at least I got a chuckle today.

And that is the "Morning Report" from the field.
(apologies to Rowan Atkinson's character).

Moose

Re:we need regulation -- NOW

[Lumpish Scholar]

Nicely plagiarized from here.

Compare and contrast: "The U.S. government should hold off regulating high-speed Internet services to accelerate their deployment, an independent panel of experts said in a report that could bolster telephone giants' lobbying for relief from having to share network parts with rivals."

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)..

[Anonymous Coward]

I am part of the AT&T crew, and you should be up tonight. We are working our tails off to get the network elements in place and have everyone migrated ASAP...I believe that we will be done by Thursday evening.

I do feel bad for our customers, and our customer service folks, that they got caught up in this pissing match between Excite@home and AT&T Broadband.

Re:we need regulation -- NOW

[corbettw]

This is wrong on so many levels it's painful to read. But all I'm going to point out is that California's energy crisis was not the result of deregulation, as it never occurred. What really happened is that the State told power resellers they could only charge a fixed amount for power, but wholesalers could charge whatever they wanted. This led to power utilities selling energy for *less then they paid for it*. There's no way any company can stay in business very long under those circumstances.

Given that example of government interferance in the market, why do you think anything different would happen if they got their dirty hands into the Internet business?

Just pick an IP

[Anonymous Coward]

If you just set an IP, it's not like it matters. I'm sure 90% of the people on that network are using windows, and if you get an IP address conflict with them, their computer will cower in fear and shutoff the network. The IP will be yours.

home.attbroadband.com (Re:AT&T Welcome Page)

[Tofuhead]

Probably not directly related to what you're talking about, but...

Has anybody tried visiting http://home.attbroadband.com yet? Since yesterday morning (and still, to this minute), it's been pointing to www.yahoo.com.

Hmm, I wonder. "The enemy of my enemy...?"

< tofuhead >

Re:Several things to watch out for with the instal

[Inside_Joke]

That's odd. I didn't have any problems like that with my @Home installation. Hooked up the modem, changed the network settings, looked at a few pages to make sure it worked (and boy, does it!), and that was it. Whole thing took all of 10 minutes. Hardest part was getting behind the desk to hook in the cable.

Re:Several things to watch out for with the instal

[Skuld-Chan]

You're better off then me - ever since the transition my connection has been 300 baud down and I'm not quite sure what up (and I'm not bs'ing you in the slightest).

Re:we need regulation -- NOW

[spam_and_egcs]

Give me a break. Could we be any more alarmist?

You know what? I'm one of those @Home customers that is going to be without service until Thurs. I have a real reason to complain, as I am going to graduate school remotely, and rely on my connection to complete my work and watch lectures. The final is Monday, so the timing couldn't be worse. But I'm not bitching. Why? Because I have the *choice* to use dialup, which I can get for 1/3 the price. It will take me longer, but I can still get the job done. Besides, there are more important issues on my mind right now than whether or not I can check my email. The mail and the phone still work fine, thanks.

You try to draw a parallel to the power crisis (I'm also a Californian), but it doesn't hold water. To start with, the previous Republican administration that did this half-assed job of deregulation only went 1/2 way, keeping control of some aspects (capping prices) but not others (supply). Then, Gov. Davis got the ball and dropped it. His idea of helping the power crisis is to bail out the power monopolies so that they can keep gouging the customers, then cap the prices so they can't keep the lights on. The whole point is to let them go bankrupt and let other companies spring up in their place, fostering competition for supply and customers. There was a utility company in Az. that basically was ready to sell us all the power we needed, but could not afford to because of the price caps. So the lights went out. Yeah - regulation really helped that one.

Had the utilities been able to purchase the power, the lights would have stayed on. And the price would have gone up to be a little closer to what the rest of the nation pays. Better still, customers would start choosing other utilities that are offering better rates, fostering competition. Then we start to see a situation like the long-distance carriers. This is good. The power crisis had nothing to do with having independent power operators - it had to do with the government sticking their nose in, capping prices and making it damned near impossible for the utilities to compete. This is where your analogy falls apart - the lights went out becuase of governmental control. My broadband is out because AT&T screwed us, and as a consumer I have all kinds of legal avenues to pursue this issue. Meanwhile, I can go elsewhere for other service.

Okay, so here's where I actually come your way and start to agree with you - regulation needs to extend to the *infrastructure*. The power grid (lines, transformers, substations), which needs to be managed on at least a county level for security and continuity reasons, should be owned and managed by the county or state, leased to the utilities. This is the arrangement for water, sewer and phone. Why is it not the case for power? As for cable, I lost service because AT&T fscked up, dropped the ball and screwed its customers. And I plan on changing my service. Enough people do this and they get the point. And we can because it is a free market, allowing other companies to come along and compete. That's how capitalism is supposed to work.

I know I am missing details in areas, but for brevity I tried to hit the important points. The point I am trying to make is that when we have the government regulating prices and terms of service, it ultimately takes the power (pardon the pun) out of the hands of the consumer, and places it into the hands of the companies providing service.

You can't cancel!

[rkuris]

I just tried calling AT&T Broadband to cancel my service, since I have found broadband access elsewhere, and they said they couldn't do it! The problem is they are changing their systems, and suggested I call back on the 12th.

The main reason I chose to look elsewhere is their new subscriber agreement specifically states that you are stealing their service if you hook up another computer to the network:

(g.) Theft of Service. Customer shall not connect the Service or any AT&T Broadband Equipment to more computers, either on or outside of the Premises, than are reflected in Customer's account with AT&T Broadband. Customer acknowledges that any unauthorized receipt of the Service constitutes theft of service, which is a violation of federal law and can result in both civil and criminal penalties. In addition, if the violations are willful and for commercial advantage or private financial gain, the penalties may be increased.

So... for those of you staying with AT&T Broadband, you better tell them about masqueraded hosts!

Re:You can't cancel!

[Anonymous Coward]

Very well, drop the service, but I'll call it overkill. Honestly, did you plan to let any of their servicemen into your home without disassembling that NAT setup or hiding that spliced portion of coax where you removed the video filter? :)

Re:You can't cancel!

[indiigo]

yeah... you can't even cancel the extra IP addresses that you used to use under @home... and they don't work with the new Network!

Re:You can't cancel!

[ryanvm]

You are the same guy who can't bring himself to remove the tags on his mattress, aren't you?

Re:You can't cancel!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you only connect their cable modem to one computer (ie your firewall) and then connect other computers to the firewall, you still have only one computer connected to the Service or any AT&T Broadband Equipment.

Re:You can't cancel!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this clause similar to the one in most cable service agreements?

Cheating the cable company is illegal and bad. Still, I get the feeling a lot of people do it anyway and never get caught. I'm not sure this will have much effect on the problem.

Re:You can't cancel!

[pongo000]

OTOH, nothing in the AUP specifically prohibits servers in connection with the service. In fact, this paragraph seems to contradict the whole idea of one computer/one account (bold mine):

(i.) FTP/HTTP Service Setup. Customer acknowledges that when using the Service there are certain applications such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server or HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) server which may be used by other persons or
entities to allow such other persons or entities to gain access to Customer?s Equipment. Customer is solely responsible for the
security of the Customer Equipment or any other equipment Customer chooses to use in connection with the Service, including
without limitation any data stored on such equipment. Neither AT&T Broadband nor its affiliates shall have any liability
whatsoever for any claims, losses, actions, damages, suits or proceedings resulting from, arising out of or otherwise relating to
the use of such applications by Customer, or the access by others to the Customer Equipment or other equipment of Customer.

I'll take my chances on the conflict between these two AUP provisions.

Re:You can't cancel!

[Anonymous Coward]

When the cable guy (not Jim Carrey) came to install my modem, he told me he'd have to remove one of the premium channel filters because the signal from the box to the house wasn't strong enough with the in-line filters. So he asked me what channel I wanted. I told him Showtime.

Now I wish I had told him HBO. Nevertheless, I'm waiting for the cable police to show up at my door asking me how long I've been stealing their service :)

Re:You can't cancel!

[randomgeek]

Granted, legalese isn't always the easiest to read, but if you actually take a second to read and understand what they're saying here, they're not saying you can't have your connection shared, just that you can't hook multiple computers up to THEIR network. In other words, if you only have one computer directly connected to their network, you're fine to run NAT. However, if you were to hang a hub off your cable modem, and connect 5 computers DIRECTLY to their network, you'd be violating their terms. It says connect the Service or any of their equipment to more computers, not use the service on multiple computers.

Re:You can't cancel!

[Syberghost]

So... for those of you staying with AT&T Broadband, you better tell them about masqueraded hosts!

Your masqueraded hosts aren't connected to their network, and aren't connected to "the Service" any more than the web servers you speak to on the other end are.

Your NAT box is connected to the network, and it is the only thing sending traffic on their network. The fact that it gets the contents of some of those packets from other computers is irrelevant, and the fact that it sends traffic to other computers is equally irrelevant. After all, even if you had only one computer, it'd be sending packets to Slashdot, and Slashdot would be sending packets to it.

This provision is meant to stop you from discovering that in many locations, the DHCP servers will respond to multiple machines on your end, so that you could technically hook the cable modem into a hub and get multiple direct connections. As is becoming the norm for such things, they have the lawyers fix the technical problems instead of the system administrators.

Re:You can't cancel!

[filbo]

First of all, the agreement says you can't associate a host name with your dynamic IP for commercial purposes. The implication is you can do it for non-commercial purposes. As the reason for doing so is to run servers, this section implies it is okay to do so. But nowhere are you given direct permission to do so, nor does the agreement appear to prohibit private servers.

However, the paragraph you are citing is in the "Limitations of Liability" section. that section doesn't give you any rights. Instead, it limits your rights. All this is saying is that if someone manages to hack your computer, it is your problem and not ATTBI's. they aren't say its okay to run the server; only that you do so at your own risk. This is a limiting provision, and will not be interpreted to give you the right to run a server by implication.

Re:You can't cancel!

[aphrael]

Huh? You seem to be reading that differently than I am. it looks like At&t is saying, if you set up a server on your machine, and let people from outside the network ftp into it, and the machine is damaged, they as network provider are not responsible. That's a totally different issue from how many connections you can have connect through your node.

Re:Several things to watch out for with the instal

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise that associations made through the file manager (both explorer and winfile) set them through the registry, don't you? Moron.

Boulder back up!

[coyote-san]

My Boulder modem is back up, at least temporarily. I did have to change my linksys firewall/router from a static IP address to DHCP....

Re:Boulder back up!

[bwhaley]

Yeah I had to change my Debian box as well... I'm not complaining though. I hope my IP doesn't change too often but if so I'll just memorize that long ass cxxxxx-a hostname.

Re:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)..

[bwhaley]

You are right :) I am back up now. Thanks for the hard work.

Re:Several things to watch out for with the instal

[The Bungi]

I had made a "hard" association of vbs with notepad to avoid viruses (via winfile, so registry entries would not over write my association). The installer broke (or re-enabled it, if you prefer) that association. Grrrrrr.

That's because it reinstalled the Windows Scripting Host.

Open the registry entry for all script files (WSF, VBS, JS and so on) and set the default action (on the root of the registry tree for the file type) to EDIT instead of OPEN. All you ever get when a script worm hits are tons of instances of Notepad. This is not affected by updates to the WSH, which only looks to see if the file associations are correct, not which one of the shell commands is the default.

If you think about it, this is the cheapest possible anti virus agent designed specifically for script worms =)

Did not notice the change..

[Axe]

..My ATT cable got back - and you know, my IP, gateway, DNS etc. did not change.. Same trace to my office computer..

Left me wondering - what was the dowtime (three days) for, and what actually changed..

Politics of business..

Re:Did not notice the change..

[digitalunity]

First off, AT&T missed the negotiation deadline. You happen to be in one of the areas where AT&T didn't switch you over to their network in time. AT&T did end up getting a contract with @home, albeit a little late. That accounts for your downtime.

On a side note... oddly I've been switched over to attbi yet they will still route traffic from my old @home IP address. Think that's odd enough? I've found that it will route packets from my computer with almost any IP address that @home owns. IP Spoofing time? I think so. :)

(for those in charge... I'm just kidding about the IP spoofing)

Deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Before we talk about (de)regulation of an industry...remember what happened to the savings and loans, the trucking industry, the railroads, the bad side of what happened to the airline industry, the bad side of what happened to the telephone industry. I'm sure there are a few other de-regulation debacles out there.

The fact is, either deregulation or regulation can work fine if done right...we have never done either one right so we are screwed no matter what.

Chicago is back ON

[thammoud]

Just got my service back. Linux re-acquired a new IP address and other DNS info. Changed my local are network to push the new DNS entries to my wireless 2K machines via DHCP.

Things work great. Changed couple of settings for mail and news (Not much sucess with news). Speed is great as usual. I don't know how AT&T pulled this one off, but they seemed to have done a great job in such a short period of time. Wow.

Nope..

[Axe]

..it came back up.. all the IPs, gateway, DNS, trace to my office machine, download rate, ping time stayed EXACTLY the same. Makes me wonder what were they doing all this time.

Oh, wait.. my IP was changed 2 months ago.. Maybe THAT was the time they switched me?

Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

[DrStrange]

I must start off by saying I am an AT&T Broadband customer who just got his service back after a 4 day absence. I could go on and on about what a poor decision the business people at AT&T and Excite made but that's be done to death. I'm posting to salute the network engineers who are moving 100's of thousands of subscribers per day! They have nothing to do with the business end of this whole mess but I have never seen a panic induced migration move so quickly! I have some choice words for people wearing suits in this but hey to you guys in jeans and a tshirt working ling hours in raised floor network offices, nice job.

Re:Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

[DoXaVG]

hear hear

Re:Give Credit Where Credit Is Due

[WannaBeGeekGirl]

Good point. Moving half a million users to a new network in ~5 days is quite a feat. I'm sure there will be kinks, but focusing on the positive side:

Anyone know how they did this?

How do you test a newly configured network for 500k users to make sure its working before going online?

Am I the only one impressed that AT&T could pull this off...they haven't exactly impressed me with other services, so I'm still in shock?

Perhaps this isn't as a big of a task as I see. Can any of you network gurus comment from your standpoint?

Indeed, you guessed..

[Axe]

192.168.x.x is indeed a private subnet, what something behind Linux Firewall/NAT should look like, doesn't it? ATT gives an esentially static IP.

news server?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like the news server has been switched or capped. I can't even get 1/10th the p0rn per hour i did a week ago :~(

Maybe it's just a michigan problem, at least our modems have been up the whole time... can't have everything. I just hope the news server goes back up to a nice speed when this whole thing is sorted out.

back up in Denver!

[MoNsTeR]

I'm sure no one cares, but while I was at work AT&T Broadband service in Denver, CO came back online, yay! My ip is under 12.x.x.x, in case anyone cares. About to test the download cap by hammering the news server...

[gets some music videos]

Yup, it's capped :(, probably at the same 1.5M everyone's reporting, though I maxed out at 1.1M. Pretty disappointing since I used to top out at 4M, and even got up to 7M a few times, but it would be unreasonable to expect that level of performance for $46/m. Oh well, beats the sh1t out of dial-up ;)

capped, but not blocked

[MoNsTeR]

I'd also like to note that none of my inbound ports have been blocked, as some others had reported. Point a browser at http://12.252.112.238/~cortega to see my girlfriend's Photoshop site ;)

Re:capped, but not blocked

[linzeal]

http://neil.midworld.net/~cortega/ is that right?

Re:Several things to watch out for with the instal

[A_Non_Moose]

Skuld:
Ouch, mon.
Have you taken a look at your modem settings? just open your browser and point it to here.
you should be able to view up and down stream settings. Mine is at 128000bits...roughly 12K/s. Did the update on the cd, so at least I have email.

Bungie:
Dude, thanks for telling me. Too dang tired today. Had to stand on my head and shuffle around huge UPS batteries in addition to getting several more "shocks" to the system.
(not electric, but the "sinking...or is that syncing?--sorry, bad joke from the CMOS discussion--...feeling variety from the "didja hear about {fill in Oh, No! variety})

However, I think for a moment that it could be worse... I could be at the other end of the phone over at Charter/Cox/{whatever} dealing with people as furious, maybe moreso, than I am.

This whole @home thing, coupled with hardware failures (dell, naturally), delays in getting replacements, an ever growing pile of stuff I have to send back..and on and on.

Could be much, much worse.

.

Sick of hearing about @Home

[Anonymous Coward]

No more @Home news, I could care less.

no offense, but...

[_avs_007]

What kinds of school does that? Even back in 1994, when I was in school, everyone had email. Even those that did not live on campus. It only cost 5 bucks for the entire time you are there. Since I was an engineering student, it was waived, since I had to pay all sorts of lab fees.

Heck, even the junior high and high schools around here are giving students email...

Shouldn't the prof be posting important information on the Class Home page? Let me guess, your class doesn't have a homepage? No offense again, but all my classes, even back in 1994 had homepages. Even my freshmen writing classes. They usually post sylabusses on them, in addition to req'd material.

Anyways, you shouldn't be using ISP email addresses anyways. Get your own domain name, and forward it. Or even use hotmail or something.

Interesting DNS Hack by AT&T

[xant]

In my area (SFBay Area) I discovered my service was down only because my statically-configured DNS servers weren't responding any more. Then a day later they were, but I noticed a very strange thing - all queries threw out the same IP address. So I brought up a web browser and went to slashdot.org, and their attbi new user page came up in its place.

The new user page contained information about what had happened and about how to get on the new service. (It also mentioned that they've throttled download speeds at 1.5Mbit, where I was getting 10 before. Feh!) Very weird, but darned if it wasn't a good solution. So I discovered that you have to call them to get static IP information, but as long as dhclient is configured correctly, it'll get the right info for you. After I got my DHCP information everything was golden. I could have switched back to static if I'd wanted to.

Re:Interesting DNS Hack by AT&T

[coyote-san]

As I mentioned in a post which crossed in the ether, this "interesting DNS hack" kills any local DNS server, and raises some disturbing long-term questions.

Re:Several things to watch out for with the instal

[linzeal]

WWW, is not for you son might I suggest gopher://slashdot.org ?

But how much did it cost them?

[autopr0n]

It might have cost ATT a shitload of money to get everything setup so quick, I wouldn't be surprized if cost them upwards of $300 million.

Re:But how much did it cost them?

[Anonymous Coward]

It cost much, much less than $300. They already owned most of the "new" network.

DNS root servers hijacked!!!

[coyote-san]

FYI, my AT&T cable (Boulder) came up and everything was fine once I told my Linksys box to use DHCP instead of a static IP address, but everything went to hell after about 15-20 minutes when AT&T HIJACKED THE ROOT DNS SERVERS. Every single address, including attbi.com, resolves to their transition site. I couldn't even bring up their help page.

On the one hand, this is clearly a (feeble) attempt to communicate with their users. How many Windows users do they think are using the root DNS servers?! -- it will primarily hit the people using "unsupported" operating systems.

But this makes the broadband service unusable to those of us running our own local DNS servers precisely because of problems we've had in the past with theirs. Sure, there are workarounds (I can think of several), but in the overall picture they're more hassles to maintain than my current approach.

I couldn't get through the ATTBI number (never any complaints when you don't give the sheep a way to reach a person!), but asked the cable TV person to pass on my... annoyance but temporary acceptance of the situation... and to ask the ATTBI people to call be back with an ETA for when the root DNS servers will be restored.

I fear, deep in my cynical heart, that this is actually an attempt to force everyone to use their DNS servers so they can track our movements and ultimately hijack additional content. E.g., you ask for "www.ford.com" but get a "www.chevrolet.com" interstital. In that case the root DNS servers are never coming back... and I want to close my account as soon as possible.

At least, for now, they aren't blocking the DNS servers of other ISPs. I've still lost some important local functionality, but at least I'm able to get back up.

WTF!?

[autopr0n]

ISU has their own email system, it has for over a decade.

Centre County PA falls through the cracks

[theduck]

AT&T might have reprovisioned 500,000 of their broadband customers already, but the 5500 of us in Centre County, PA, aren't going to be that lucky. AT&T was in the process of selling us to Adelphia so we weren't included in their contingency plans. According to local news, it seems that the current target is the end of December so AT&T will be sending us CDs for free dialup for the duration. Free dialup for a month...woohoo. Better lower my slashdot thread preference to 1000.

Re:home.attbroadband.com (Re:AT&T Welcome Page

[.oO-DexteR-Oo.]

Yeah, I noticed that.... It's kinda funny, to the left and up of the search box, there is the following text: Looking for Reliable Broadband? Get SBC DSL Internet Service

It's ok...

[abe ferlman]

All the computers in my neighborhood are a giant beowulf cluster!

Repeat after me: the network is the computer... the network is the computer...

Re:It's ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you the sausage king of Chicago?

Re:It's ok...

[abe ferlman]

Yep, that's me. 1117 baby.

CORRECTION....

[coyote-san]

Checking my settings, I saw that I was using my last known @Home DNS addresses as the 'forwarder' addresses. When I replaced them with 0.0.0.0 (forcing a query against the root servers) I got the right addresses.

So they hijacked their old DNS server addresses (assuming they were operated by Excite), not the root DNS servers... but that would be a trivial change to make. Definitely not something that gives knowledgeable users warm fuzzies.

Re:CORRECTION....

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moron. Stop talking.

Re:CORRECTION....

[ScottBla]

FYI...I spent a while trying to debug my local forwarding DNS server before I discovered all that. My DHCP gave me 4 DNS server addresses from them, but one of them didn't seem to have that hijacked root domain trick (the 204.127.198.4 address seemed OK...the others 63.x & 12.x IPs were messed up). I suppose an alternative is to forward to someone else's DNS server...picking something that's hopefully close to you on the Internet.

Nope, it's a DNS intercept

[coyote-san]

They're intercepting DNS queries to the Excite DNS IP addresses and returning a static value - a record to their transitional site. The name doesn't matter - *everything* resolves to that site.

You didn't specify how you get your DNS addresses. On a Unix/Linux box, it can hide in a lot of places. (DHCP packets, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/dhcp.conf, /etc/bind/named.conf, etc.)

from the ending-it-all dept.

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't that be from the gee-no-fucking-shit dept?

AUP and servers

[rkuris]

You may be right about allowing servers, but this doesn't authorize you to connect another computer to the network. The part that bothers me most is they actually call it theft of service.

I think they probably copied this from a cable company's "AUP", in which hooking up extra TV sets to your cable may be a violation of your agreement. This could make a precedent if they actually pursue this as theft of service and win. It would be interesting for a jury to consider this "just like cable TV".

I do think the intent of the AUP is for them to have an idea of what's behind my firewall, and I'm not about to do that.

Re:AUP and servers

[pongo000]

Extending your thought, one might even be able to classify a smart router as a "computer." In which case, the only thing that will be able to access the service is your router!

This provision seems pretty absurd. It's not like AT&T owns the data being sent through your firewall. Hell, they don't own anything beyond the demarc location on the side of the house/apt. where their cable connects to yours (and the cable modem if you didn't provide your own). Once the data hits my firewall, I simply cannot see how AT&T can exert further control over what I do with it.

I'd really like to seem them try to enforce this.

Re:AUP and servers

[Graymalkin]

They can't, the theft of service is only brought down when you plug your cable modem into the uplink port on a hub and have all of your computers access the internet off the same modem. This puts multiple computers on the same connection and is sort of like me splicing some coax in a trunk and leeching off their network. If you put a router between your internal network and the cable modem there's nothing AT&T can do about it. Too many people have stuck cable modems on hubs and expected a cable provider to let them get all of their computers on the net at the same time. When you're using a router of some form only one system is actually hooked to the external network and thus doesn't violate their AUP.

Re:AUP and servers

[rkuris]

I think one could easily argue that in the network A-B-C, A is "connected" to C. I guess I just don't like the wording of this.

What about the scenario if I run a cable from my house to my neighbor's house and charge him for the service? Using your argument, this is permitted in their AUP. I am pretty sure this is not their intent.

I would love it if they said something like "the number of computers or routers directly connected to our network is specified in the service agreement. Each such computer or router is allowed to use only one dynamically-assigned IP address. No computers attached directly or indirectly to our equipment may be located off premises."

Re:AUP and servers

[filbo]

I fail to see why ATT should care how many computers I have hooked up in my own house. They are giving me 1.5Mb/s of bandwidth. I'm going to use it. It doesn't matter if I use it in one giant download or through web sessions on multiple machines. I can't take more than 1.5 Mb/s no matter how many computers I connect. So it should be my decision as to how I share the bandwidth, as long as I don't extend it outside my house.

And it's not like I've got twenty people in my house. My network consists of my primary box, another box that acts as an ethernet to local talk bridge so I can print, and a box in our guest bedroom for use on those rare occassions when both my wife and I want to use the net at the same time.

Re:AUP and servers

[Graymalkin]

It isn't about bandwidth it's about addressing. The AUP wording is more about the address usage rather than actual bandwidth usage. No one complains about dialup ISPs charging you if you're using the same account to log into multiple POPs at the same time. All of the hosts you stick on the cable modem are using the same account name, this can be a routing headache even with DHCP.

Re:AUP and servers

[Graymalkin]

Actually I think most AUPs have language specifically dealing with reselling bandwidth. A couple years ago I remember reading a news blip about some jackass getting a cable modem and figuring he'd start his own ISP. His cable company yanked his connection as soon as they heard about it. Whoever is running the ISP stuff for the cable modem just doesn't want a bunch of systems at your house all using the same user account. It's a hassle network wise to have a bunch of hosts on the same physical line with the same account name.

Re:AUP and servers

[filbo]

I don't see how there is a routing problem. My router takes the IP assigned by attbi's DHCP server. It then routes traffic from within my LAN. attbi just sees traffic coming out of my router, just like it would if I had my computer connected directly to the cable modem. It's no different to them. There aren't multiple "hosts" as far as they are concerned. Just one. The router.

Also, see the attbi FAQ, which states that you can have up to 4 computers connected to your cable line.

A dissenting voice....

[coyote-san]

I don't want to trivialize the effort in moving hundreds of thousands of users, but IMHO they exercised extremely poor judgement in prioritizing the work.

There are two separate issues here. One is basic connectivity, the other are the bundled ISP services.

Many of us (a small fraction of their users, but more common among the Linux/Unix users) used them solely for connectivity. It's not just elitism either: when you have your own domain(s) and hosting services, you don't have much interest in these bundled services. *Especially* when we consider all ISPs a bit iffy, having been around the block a few times already - some of us have "vanity domains" precisely to avoid this sudden need to change email and web addresses etc.

Yet we spent days without access while someone was busy creating an account we will never use to replace another account we never used. Give us basic connectivity and we're happy - at worst we use the DNS from our hosting account for a few days. But no, we were left in the dark for days.

Of course, most people do use the bundled ISP accounts, but again they have alternative accounts at Hotmail, at the office, etc. Again, give them basic connectivity and DNS services and they'll be able to do a lot, even if they don't have their usual email for a few days. But no, they were left in the dark for days.

The only people this policy served were those refugees from AOL who never looked beyond their own email or web pages. I'm sure there were a few, but I would be surprised if it was more than 10%.

I believe the vast majority of people would prefer to have basic connectivity up within 24 hours, even if it delayed email and web pages for a few additional days, than to be dark for days.

We may be moved over, but their network sucks

[yorgasor]

I've got nothing but complaints since ATT took over. First there's the deal with the nameservers. My DHCP client was given three numbers. One doesn't work at all. One kind of works, but for some reason I get an 80% packet loss whenever I use it. And one seems to work pretty well. I had to test each one individually to find the good one, because when I set the DNS servers manually on my internal network, my linux box cycles between the three. It wasn't very fun having a website show up properly only 33% of the time.

I thought I'd try getting updated information from the DHCP server, hoping they'd have something better. When I restarted the network on my gateway, the DHCP request timed out. Their server was down. Fortunately, I had a copy of what I was given before so I could get my network back up. Otherwise I would've been AOL (SOL in internet terms;) until they finally got around to bringing up their DHCP server.

Overall, I must say I'm not impressed at all and am finally getting ready to switch to DSL.

editing?

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T say that as of Tuesday morning they have moved 500,000 of their subscribers over to their network.

if this sentence doesn't need editing, i don't know what does.

come on, Hemos. if y'all are gonna claim to be "editors" on slashdot, then please, do some damn editing! otherwise, perhaps the people who run slashdot should be called "submission queue monitors" or "lameness filters" or something like that, if all you're going to do is click either "accept" or "reject" for each story.

props

[Anonymous Coward]

props to all my dead @homies

I miss @home already...

[aussersterne]

AT&T in SLC is back online.

They hijacked the DNS stuff to take me to attbi.com every other minute, so I've set my forwarders to the DNS servers for the att.com domain instead of using the ones they're supplying. Ugh.

Next, my DHCP lease was renewing way too often, so I've assumed the IP that I was getting is mine (I'm not counting on it though) and am using it statically now. UGH.

And now, finally online without interruption, if uncomfortably, I learn that the connection is throttled downstream, so that instead of pulling down 7-8Mbits, I'm only getting 1.5 (and really a little less). UGH!

Kernel downloads are now >2min instead of just a few seconds.

I knew it was too good to last. From a working $40/mo. 8Mbit setup with my own IP to an unreliable 1.5Mbit setup, for the same price, with a half-week outage to boot.

The good old days are gone... Now it really feels like the tech boom is over.

Re:I miss @home already...

[Vegeta99]

aww, boo hoo! My 8Mbit cable modem i was ONLY paying $40 for is gone! The provider went OUT OF BUSINESS, and the resaler, instead of just dumping me on the street gave me what I see as SHODDY SERVICE!

pfft. Whino.

Re:we need regulation -- NOW

[Phroggy]

The power grid (lines, transformers, substations), which needs to be managed on at least a county level for security and continuity reasons, should be owned and managed by the county or state, leased to the utilities. This is the arrangement for water, sewer and phone.

It's my understanding that phone lines are actually owned by the phone companies, who are granted monopolies on providing local phone service by the FCC, with a whole tangle of regulations. Power works the same way.

Then and Now. All the same

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking back a couple of years... One wonders what this day would be like if users would have been able to select an ISP versus the single option of @home.

If ISP options were available.. Many of us would have taken the 2-3 dollar, static IP, no content, minimalist, just-my-high-speed-access-thank-you option.

Now here we are paying for AT&T (or in my case, Charter Pipeline) content and features. Just as we were for @home. We still have no options and are stuck with the package and rates they calculate for the masses.

Growing tired of mass^H^H^Hisrepresentation.

Re:huh? yup

[microchp]

Its even simpler than that. Both Excite and AT&T have their own network backbone. AT&T is still very new to the internet backbone arena. While they do provide carrier class telco connections, and national SS7 circuits, they are not built out to handle ATM traffic (ooopss, we forgot the routers) Excite built and managed an extremely large backbone, which peered with dozens of very large ISP's, to include UUNET, and many other huge networks. Excite had one of the largest networks, aside from UUNET. They actually passed more traffic than AOHELL. Excite used AT&T to manage the users, paying them x number of cents on the dollar to manage the customers, while AT&T used Excite and various other network providers to manage the backbone. AT&T finally learned (using Excite) how to manage the network, and thus did not need them any more. Since Excite owned all the equipment, AT&T had to build their own network, or buy the existing ones. Building a new one was not really that difficult, since all the pop's, and redundant OC's connecting them are already in place. Unfortunatly the transition from Excite to AT&T did not happen before Excite pulled the plug. I found this weird, since they are in some ways the same company if you consider how much of Excite that AT&T already owned. Ack... I am rambling.. I already wasted my two cents.

Customers Lost

[krokodil]

So they are reconnecting roughly 500K subscribers, while originally they had around 800K. Looks like they lost 300K subscribers to other providers (mostly DSL I guess).

Re:Customers Lost

[rkuris]

I don't see how that is possible. AT&T tells me they cannot terminate my account until the 12th.

Re:Several things to watch out for with the instal

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you use the installer they provide? You have to *know* it will either not work correctly, or it will do more than it should.

I ran the manual configuration. Basically it amounts to setting your ip to use dhcp instead of a static ip, and pointing your email and news to a different server. Tough change.

I still love how @home (and now at&t) always stated that "we only support outlook". I talked to tech support once because their mail server was incredibly slow for sending mail but quick for receiving. Client was irrelevent, but they kept insisting that "we don't support eudora". Classic help desk doa. (Delusions of Adequacy)

(Sigh) if only we could have a public internet...

[MantridDronemaker]

Hopefully one day we will all be able to just run IPv6 and have arbitrary connections to each other on a neighbourhood basis, be it our own cables between houses or some newer high speed wireless system (like 802.11b only with more bandwidth) creating a true decentralized Internet. Of course the big problem will always be the long distance runs with the big fat pipes- other than this we could probably do everything without the huge ISPs couldn't we?

Just dreaming right now of course- but wouldn't be nice not to have to rely on big companies like AT&T or whoever? Heck once something like that became pervasive enough - we wouldn't need them for phone calls either! I'm sure many people (myself included) would opt for TV service be it cable or Satellite- but at least having TV is not a necessity like communicating is!

Those AT&T clowns do not know what reverse DNS

[leob]

With @Home I was uisng some (news) servers that required the clients to have proper reverse DNS. With
AT&T, nobody gets reverse DNS and their customer support does not even know what that is!

Good Point

[bstadil]

You are right, I learned later that AT&T has agreed to hire 300 @home people so for sure they are getting hit.

Re:Those AT&T clowns do not know what reverse

[rpenguin]

It looks like attbi has been changing their naming scheme around a bit and it takes a while for reverse DNS to propogate worldwide. At some point you should get a dns name along the lines of "10-0-0-1.client.attbi.com" from your attbi ip address. To further complicate matters, some servers like to cache reverse lookups, and I wouldn't put it past them to cache failed reverse lookups.

All in all, I'm impressed with AT&T's speed of transition, ten days of downtime isn't bad at all. I lived without power for nearly that long after a hurricane. :)

Re:we need regulation -- NOW

[spam_and_egcs]

Oops, I sit corrected. = /