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?

[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.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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 ?

[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: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.

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.

[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.

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

[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

[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.

New Provider name:

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's call it "@Homeless".

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..."

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!!

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.

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?

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).

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: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.)

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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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: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 =)

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

[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?

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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

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...

[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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.