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

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.

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 ?

[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]

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?

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.

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.

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: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.

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

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!

[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.

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.