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AT&T Broadband To Merge With Comcast Cable
quualudes was one of the many people to
submit the AT&T Broadband/Comcast merger. CNNfn has more of the story as well. 72$ billion is the cost. Wow. I wonder how this affects @Home. One alert reader also submitted the news that Comcast will evidently by launching a video gaming channel - more information will be coming in February 2002.
Since they went bankrupt. Now it's AT&T Broadband Internet. They've already changed my email address and throttled down my bandwidth. I hope it doesn't get worse.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
As for the cable business, Comcast can only be an improvement. AT&T service was dismal, but typical of this truly out of date corporate dinosaur.
...that Microsoft gets $5 billion in "preferred securities as part of the deal?"
I guess that is better than AOL Time Warner buying AT&T Broadband.
*sigh*
Is that a joke? @Home is unrelated to this deal. ATT had a minority equity interest in "Excite@Home," the company that went bankrupt. AT&T is just a losing investor there.
"AT&T@Home" was a brand name for @Home service distributed by AT&T Digital Cable, not a corporate entity.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
is new again...
I used to have Comcast cable television and broadband internet service. When AT&T bought MediaOne, they also acquired the Comcast division that serviced my area. Eventually, the switch was made to calling the service AT&T broadband. I find it somewhat amusing that less than a year later, I'm about to be back on Comcast. AT&T broadband was so bad that I switched back to DSL and abandoned my cable television entirely. All AT&T seemed able to do was remove good channels (WGN Chicago, Speedvision, and some others) and run commercials advertising 5 non-functional customer service phone numbers and about a zillion ads informing paying customers that stealing cable tv is a crime. Maybe Comcast will learn something from AT&T's plans to take over the cable industry. Somehow, I kinda doubt it. At least maybe now I can have decent cable tv again.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
I think it is very funny (as in peculiar) that mergers like this happen. And once this all ends up being some kind of OmniCorp(tm) people start looking around saying that it is terrible that we have another monopoly. I rather fancy the analogy from Demolition Man, where Taco Bell has become the only survivor of the fast food chains.
Shakedown between AOL/Time Warner and ComCast/AT&T anytime soon? Likely to go on for years and cost tramendous amounts of money. Money that the customer will have to pay once the winner has the monopoly...
Or maybe I am just paranoid and this is all not going to happen. But I think it's interesting nevertheless.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
They REFUSE to sell you anymore bandwidth, no matter what you are willing to pay...
ATT wasn't able to evolve its IT systems to keep up with changes in its business. I remember back, prolly '94, reading about how they had a hundred or more different systems and how they had the enormous task of consolidating and modernizing these systems, the goal being a unified view of the customer (rather than the vertical systems they had for each business).
It wasn't that they didn't recognize this problem or try to do anything about it. They never came up with a workable strategy. Frankly, I'm not sure how you would even begin to tackle a problem like this.
I don't think that Comcast really cares about all the people quitting the internet service.
Keep in mind that AT&T Broadband is still the largest cable company in the U.S. So I think that what Comcast really wants is the regions that AT&T Broadband cable television is covering.
So although people may be leaving cable modems to go to dsl they aren't necessarily going to leave their cable television service, which is what I think Comcast really wants.
Thank you. Thank you. Please no applause; just throw money
Armstrong's big play when he came into AT&T and bought the Broadband and Wireless businesses and announced the Fixed Wireless development was that AT&T would be able to stop needing the LECs to access a large fraction of US telephone users, saving boatloads of money and creating real competition. (Similarly, the Northpoint DSL buy and the Covad-based DSL services play wiht that.) The technical developments that were needed to make all three-four networks play together were substantial, and they weren't successfully implemented - they got distracted by the Cable Openness political fiasco, and the cable tv networks were a technically bad patchwork instead of an integrated system, and IP telephony technology was much farther away from practical scalable working equipment than they needed to win, but fundamentally they had to get out of the old telco architectural mindsets and the old long distance telephony business mindsets. Doing the job right requires radically changing the architecture and barbequeing their cash cow before somebody else does it - if Armstrong's big gamble had been executed well, they'd have had the bigness they need to make it possible to stick together afterwards, but it didn't happen.
You might want to check your facts. AOL has over 30 million members.
http://www.aoltimewarner.com/about/companies/amer
AT&T sucks. They have managed to purchase a decent cable/broadband company and singlehandedly run it into the ground. Since AT&T's purchase of Mediaone, we've been subjected to increased downtime, crappy digital cable service, slow internet, awful customer service, all with them raising prices across the board. their digital box is the size of a VCR, has no hi-fi outputs (not that it matters, most of the channels are still analog), was designed 4 years ago, and the SLOW ASS interface is worse than my grandma's WebTV.
Crap. I just needed to rant about how much they sucked. Hopefully Comcast can improve the service a little. Personally I'll be happy if they can go for 6 months without changing their name. Since I subscribed, I had MediaOne for about 3 months, my cable was called MediaOne RoadRunner. Then it was AT&T Broadband, with AT&T RoadRunner for internet. Then the Internet was CALLED AT&T@Home, even though it was really the AT&T Broadband Internet network. Now it's called AT&TBI.