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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."
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
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?
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
I'll take my chances on the conflict between these two AUP provisions.