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@Home Post Mortem: Who or What Killed @Home?
bofus writes: "This article from CNet points to AT&T taking over the @Home board as the nail in the coffin for @Home. It starts out as a tale of possible corporate espionage, with a top techie from AT&T moving to @Home and then back to AT&T, but the guy in question seems to have done nothing but good for @Home while he was there."
I've been moved from one ISP to the other and I've never seen any good come out of it either.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but maybe it was bad accounting practices?
I started out with MediaOne Broadband back a few years ago, which then became MediaOne-Roadrunner, which then became MediaOne Express, which changed to AT&T@Home, which is now AT&T Broadband.
I never understood the point of the @Home network, it seemed needlessly redundant. Some people complain that attbi service is slower, but I still seem to get good speeds.
For reference, check this screenshot out of a speed test:
http://www.whichwayup.org/images/leet.gif
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
It starts out as a tale of possible corporate espionage, with a top techie from AT&T moving to @Home and then back to AT&T, but the guy in question seems to have done nothing but good for @Home while he was there.
In other words, he was actually good at it?
Give me their e-mail so I can send a thank you note.
Cowboy Neal on the grassy knoll.
Back and to the left...
ISP going under? Go back to college! Sure it might cost a few more dollars a month, but you also get more bandwidth. =D
I have a shitty sig!
Maybe because you could browse the web for an hour, and end up knowing more about networking (and geography) than @HOME specialists?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
... and the story said around goes like this: "@Home had some problems with their network and AT&T offered help. Since AT&T had lots of interest (investments) in the company, they accepted the offer. 12 AT&T technicians went to @Home and mapped the whole network and made a complete analyse of it and plans for themselves to find out the problem. But they didn't really find much. But plans were made and the same group of techies set up very soon to make their own copy of the @Home setup."
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
@Home Post Mortem: Who or What Killed @Home?
Sorry, it was me, I didn't realize that letting my monthly payment slip a few weeks would have such a big impact on the company. I really feel bad about it though.
He wouldn't want to do anything to damage a future corporate aquisition, now would he?
What really killed @Home was their portal!!
On every PC where at @Home software install was done, the home page was set up to a custom, VERY high-bandwidth portal site. It had daily movies, ridiculously sized graphics, and tons of customization. And no one ever used it fully!! It was difficult to navigate, and had an ugly interface.
So every time a person opened up their browser, poof, they were force-fed a ton of high-bandwidth info that they didn't want. Combine the delivery costs with the costs of maintaining that content, and you have millions of dollars down the drain. Those millions could have saved them in the long run, IMHO.
I'm not interested in Quake 3. There's no "streaming media" or whatever it's called on the Internet I can find that I can't just watch on TV. All I need the 'net for is e-mail, looking up the occasional website, and maybe talking to some friends on ICQ. This is what killed @home, and what is slowly cutting away the margins of the few remaining broadband companies. There are too many players in a field we consumers just aren't interested in, and the market can't support it. The "broadband revolution" is a fluke, just like the Internet Appliance hubbub a few years ago.
I might look into getting a cable internet connection in a few years, when a "killer app" comes out that makes it worth my time and money; right now, I just can't see why anybody other than a pasty-faced computer dork would need broadband.
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I'm wasted and I can't find my way home...
It's rather obvious who killed @Home if you just think about it...
It was Colonel Mustard with a candle in the library. Duh.
The problems are completely due to consumers. People got too greedy, got too used to fast connections and paying nothing. When prices were elevated to recover costs people wimped out.
That and idiots who like to complain about service being cut when they violate their TOS and run servers... idiots.
scott
It was a one-armed man!
:-p
:-p
...what the hell...I got karma to burn!
You're using her as bait, Master!
It was Col. Mustard, in the library, with a candlestick.
On the plus side, this article has some thorough reporting. Which is a nice departure from the press-release driven slop CNET usually dishes: "AMD announced its high end end processor will jump from 2.3 to 2.4 GHz."
On the down side, there's no attempt at analysis. All we know is Eslambolchi might have donated HIV infected blood to a terribly wounded company. In the short term, @Home clearly benefited from his expertise. But his tenure might have destroyed the company.
This was a good article because it raised some important questions. A great article would have provided answers.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Web use: 1 hour of 'net christmas shopping via broadband == 6 hours of 'net christmas shopping over a modem.
Why would your average person spend hours in front of a computer screen trying to navigate some byzantine e-commerce site, when they could call up a couple friends and go down to the local shopping center? You can't underestimate the importance of having that social element when shopping, something which web shopping will never be able to replicate.
Mail use: 200 e-mails a day == 30 seconds to check via broadband, 10 minutes to check via modem.
200 emails a day sounds like a rather exceptional number to me; I doubt I receive more than 10 pieces a day. My hypersocial roommate spends more time on Hotmail than anyone else I know, and I still don't believe she gets more than 40 mails a day.
Research: 100 .PDF files from scholarly journals for a research paper == 1 afternoon to find and download via broadband, 3 weeks to find and download via modem.
Once again, I would probably head down to the library with a friend or two before I tried to search the Internet for any length of time. I think the "3 weeks" figure you posit for modem users is a bit excessive; I'm a lousy Googler and can still find what I'm looking for in a matter of hours if I'm determined enough.
Software: 1 download of Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenOffice, Your Favorite Game Demo == 10 minutes to 1 hour via broadband, NEVER (good luck!) via modem.
Your average person doesn't download operating systems or game demos off the Internet. I know I sure don't.
Please realize that people like you who depend on the Internet for everything are a minority. There is a market for broadband in your demographic, sure, but my point was that this demographic that needs/wants broadband is much smaller than the providers think, and it is market forces that killed @home.
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I'm wasted and I can't find my way home...
People using it weren't costing @Home any money. Every city had their own personal proxy server that was also set up as a default that cached the content, so all that high bandwidth useless content wasnt coming over the Inet pipes, but rather from the local server on the LAN. Anyone who didn't use their proxy also was smart enough to change their homepage. So you're theory is bunk.
Not@home put them out of business.
tcd004
Jesus christ. Every goddam analyst on the planet seems to think they know why @Home failed. It's not rocket science, it's basic accounting.
You dump a few billion dollars into a nationwide network, and then you convince every cable television provider you can shake a stick at that broadband internet is within their grasp, and that you'll help them deploy it by being their internet access point. You get a few hundred cable systems online, and all is good. You get 50% of their profits for providing the bandwidth, and they are happy because they've found a new source of revenue.
Your market share continues to rise as your cable systems count skyrockets past the thousands. Everything is great! But then it happens. Being that cable systems are greedy bastards, they start eyeing up your 50% of the profits. Then, the guy in their NOC that actually had the cluestick long enough to set up the whole damn headend for broadband internet has an idea. Why don't we just drop @Home and get our bandwidth from the local telcos? After all, DS3's from Chicago cost thousands more than DS3's from the Bell office down the street.
And one by one, every cable system that @Home helped set up, went independant. I worked in the cable industry at the time, and I saw it coming from a mile away. Hell, I watched the DS3 from @Home go dead. I day I heard that every one of our markets in the entire state was ditching @Home was the day I told everyone I knew to sell all of their @Home stock.
But it gets better. @Home wasn't stupid. They knew that cable providers would eventually catch on. So they made lengthy contract with them. The problem is, the contracts ended up benig too market specific. For months, we supported both @Home, and our proprietary network. All new markets going live with broadband internet wouldn't even know what @Home was, as we only offered our proprietary network in new markets.
Eventually, we bought out the remainder of the @Home contract. @Home was stupid as all hell to let that happen too. That market's size has more than doubled in the past year. They would have been rolling in it. But then again, I supposed that when you're billions in debt, lump sums of cash can sure be appealing to your accountants as they try to fend off the lenders.
Making a long story short, @Home's demise had little to do with their network, and everything to do with unrenewed/prematurely-ended contracts. @Home's network was incredibly fast. Surprised the hell out of our network engineer at several times. But, you just can't run a business when you're not generating revenue.
Im running XP Professional, at times I used to get higher speeds on @Home, but now I consistantly get decent speeds of ~150-180 KB/sec.
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
Excite. Originally, Excite was bought by @Home simply to provide content. However, when Excite's CEO took over, that idea was quickly turned around - @Home's only purpose from then on was only to provide money to the cash-hemorrhaging, media-obsessed, dot-com-fetishists screaming "I'm not quite dead!" after having lost the "portal wars" to Yahoo long before. Had Excite not been the parasite that it turned out to be, @Home would have been profitable, strong, and still expanding today. They had a product that there is clearly a demand for, and (as the article states) in spite of Excite's draining away of every penny that @Home took in (and then some), they still managed to serve over 45% of all home broadband connections in the US. It would surprise me greatly to see any other company even come close to that accomplishment. What killed @Home Network? Excite@Home did.
-NOC Monkey (OOK!) Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.
Ah, the dot-com days. We were all rich. We were so smart. We were the new paradigm. Somehow everything would be free and advertising would save us all.
Now we look in dumpsters for food.
1999 - why have you forsaken us?
Damn you 1999! Damn you to hell!
I now have an option against the pathetic offerings from cable and DSL. I can get wireless for half the price. And when this new service becomes bloated and sickly from the drain of executive greed and incompetence, I will drop them too.
If enough people excercise their options often enough, maybe companies will start to understand that noone likes doing business with a scumbag.
Why would your average person spend hours in front of a computer screen trying to navigate some byzantine e-commerce site, when they could call up a couple friends and go down to the local shopping center?
.PDF format. 100 papers on cranial morphology at 8-25MB each is 800MB to 2GB of .PDF files. If you can show me where to find papers from, say, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology just by searching Google... Please let me know so that I can save $$$$! Of course, even then, I'd still have to download all those pesky .PDF files...
Um, because my budget for christmas shopping isn't $2000, it's more like $200 -- i.e. Amazon.com, not Macy's.
200 emails a day sounds like a rather exceptional number to me; I doubt I receive more than 10 pieces a day.
If you're involved in academics or publishing in any way, *everything* is done via e-mail. You get papers, chapters, invoices, complaints, and everything else via e-mail. Busy people use e-mail. If you don't use a lot of e-mail, you must not have to deal with very many busy people. I've got friends in corporate america (no, not technology) who get twice as much e-mail as me. They e-mail at their desk, on their cell phone, on their blackberry, in their living room, and in their bathroom on their Palm, and they're not even in technology.
Once again, I would probably head down to the library with a friend or two
You certainly can't get most academic journals at a library, even a university library usually only carries a small subset of them. You certainly won't find any articles from such journals on the net through Google. The only way to get scientific research (no, not the NBC article on the research, the actual research) is to either pay for the journal ($$$$$$$) or pay for a membership to an online database which carries the journal (only $$$$)... But even with the membership, the papers are provided in
Your average person doesn't download operating systems or game demos off the Internet. I know I sure don't.
What exactly makes you average over me? I have two little sisters (out of a total of four) still living with my parents. These two (with their friends) download at least 2-4 game demos a month and play them all the way through, I understand. I don't game very much but they apparently do, and they're girls, 13 and 16 with N'Sync and Dragonball Z posters on their walls. I didn't teach them where to get game demos, I don't even know! Of course, I do download Linux...
Please realize that people like you who depend on the Internet for everything are a minority.
Woah. As I said, I depend on the Internet to: 1) save me money when I shop, 2) talk to bosses and colleagues via e-mail, 3) get academic research or other content-rich information (not just Google-searching) and 4) get free software whenever I can. Same as everyone else in the college world and many people in the non-college world.
Ever think maybe you're a little behind the curve of what "average" is?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If there were, I might consider it. As it is, I use more bandwidth surfing than my server does.
Last post!
Step 1: Build business. Dominate broadband.
Step 2: Get caught up in dot com mania. Spend 6 billion on dot com in search of a business model.
Step 3: Spend a few years trying to recover from step 2.
Step 4: Chapter 11
The speeds to most of the commercial net are still pretty good back home (Atlanta) on AT&T Broadband, with one exception: Internet2.
Before we lost @Home and went to AT&T Broadband, I could regularly get 10-15ms pings to GA Tech, UNC (metalab), and Auburn (here), but since the switch, ping times have gone up to ~200ms on average, and bandwidth was cut from 500 k/s (this was before the cap) to ~20 k/s (with dropped packets and hangs all the time).
So I did a little research, and it now appears that everything going from Internet2 to AT&T Broadband goes through San Fransisco. Even from my house in Atlanta to GA Tech (maybe 5 miles?). Yeah. And since that's what I mainly use my cable modem at home for (getting updates and stuff off of my main server here), it kind of stinks. A lot.
But apart from that (and as far as my mom is concerned), it's plenty quick for wandering around on the web and email and all that stuff
TV, for all its faults, still provides a common cultural base for people in this day and age. Believe me, I've given up the idiot box for lengths of time, and I can't believe how socially isolated the lack of that common medium made me after a while. I'm certainly not any stupider for watching the occasional Ally McBeal episode or CNN newscast.
(this, by the way folks, is where the sterotypes about females and computing come from. Ignoring that it is a troll, the last line insulting nerds is not a good thing. I am not pasty faced, though I do aim for it. :P )
I don't see what my being female has to do with my lack of technical fortitude. I'm sure I could become a commandline jock like all you Slashdotters with practice, but I just don't have the time or inclination to do that sort of thing. The computer is just a tool to me, not a pastime or a toy. If that makes me a "troll", then I'm sorry. My "pasty-faced nerd" comment was a bit out of line, but I thought you guys took pride in being geeks ;-)
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I'm wasted and I can't find my way home...
Come on, think about it. Excite@Home? Why the heck did Excite put their name on it? if they had any sense they'd put the AOL logo on it and sell it to clueless computer-illiterate people who would pay $100 a month for something they don't know how to use (really, i mean, they pay $22 a month for a f**king 56k connection! that half the time connects them at 28.8!)
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I was an @home tech support agent....so I got info from the inside
@home started up the service and contracted out to cable companies
we all know this
problem was the cable companies were pretty money grubbing...in fact @home only got between 25 and 30 percent of profits per subscriber (not the 50% that one person noted) and because @home was losing money from this, they attempted to get the cable companies to alot them 50% of the profits, which halfway happened...they get maybe 40-45 in the end...and the cable companies decided to hike their prices to make even more money (none of them would've been losing any profits by keeping prices the same but they tried to put it off as only @home hiking the prices...bs)
Att actually built up their network before the contract crisis began and didnt tell anyone (I cannot tell you how I know this for I get killed =] ) and when they knew beforehand that they were already going to cancel their @home contract...or end up buying them. Att opted out as we know, but @home managed to keep contracts with some of the remaining larger contracts. These were to be extended for a short time period but there was too much money to be lost and @home had to just cancel it all. All the money was gone. The reason @home died was almost entirely because the cable providers refused to pay the money to keep the service connected through their lines, and it would've been too expensive of a venture to run the lines themselves.
here's what to do. go to some OTHER site and post it where it's relevant.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
It's nice to hear it from the inside, but it can't be that simple! Haven't you seen any movies? The story just doesn't have any interest to it if it all boils down to "@home had a stupid business model they couldn't maintain." Who will buy the movie rights for that! There has to be something more...
BlackGriffen
P.S. It's sad that the analysts can't see the obvious. I, myself, always wondered what the hell Excite@home had to do with anything since AT&T was an ISP, too, and could profit more by just keeping the customers to themselves. I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner, but if you lose your contracts...
1) Executives of @Home payed out multiple millions for shitty little websites that did nothing
2) @Home made several mistakes by trying to expand when they had no money (see 1) and being unable to provide any sort of reliable service
3) Many other companies saw what @Home had, and since they had no way to protect their market, everyone else simply split up their market share.
Why would AT&T support what they could provide themselves, and without all the rookie mistakes that @Home made.
How does this comment rate a "flamebait"? I think the idea that @home overestimated demand and thus over invested is a valid observation. I personnaly know several sorry souls how dont have and dont see the need for broadband. Even a couple a heavy internet users. @home didnt do a very good job of selling their service. Although i admit selling broadband to someone who doesnt use the internet regularly is a tough sell.
His ears glow. I could get a job if my ears glowed like that.
From the excellent Wired article: So what went wrong? "Business schools will love this," says one survivor."
And very very true. Between this and Enron, the School of Management at my University (at Buffalo) should run out of curriculum on this in, say, 2020.
When Internet providing is exactly like telecomms today.
I had a static ip address for my cox@home connection. Now when i want to ftp myself I need to remember to check my constantly changing ip address. Way to go cox, excellent way to subtract value from your service! Can anyone tell me the point of this?
It says on home.com :
Excite@Home
The Leader in Broadband
Then right below that it says:
Excite@Home Reduces workforce as operations wind down.
Now this is a company with some intelligence! Maybe they should instead put up a black band (of mourning) like on be.com...
Needlessly redundant?
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
Ever since the switch I have problems with sudden drop-outs; the service just seems to 'forget' that I'm hooked up and refuses all requests. Sometimes it clears up after a few minutes, sometimes I have to reset the modem. A real pain in the ass.
With @home I left my network up and running for months with no problems whatsoever. Never a cutout of any kind. The ATT situation can be real annoying when I need to fetch files from home via ftp, only to find that my computer has dropped out and the only way to fix the problem is to drive home and reset the modem.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
That is uninteresting. I am more interested in who killed Lolo Ferrari. Did she choke, or not? Naturally, some who have been very close to her say.
-1 overrated
A lot of clueless +4,+5 posts on this thread tonight.
ISP's realized that the price point at which you can run reliable IP services is the key to making money. If they provide you (and everybody else) a cheap way to provide services then all of the high dollar high profit customers switch to the same service you get and the profit margins plumet.
Shortly after that, the number of subscribers is astronomically large because they get cheap access to static IP's that can run IP services. This drives up costs and oh yeah it is cheap so they aren't making any money. They have to build something that scales to huge bandwidth and causes big problems.
It is my understanding that DSL and ISDN are cheaper for the phone companies to run then analog POTS lines, but they charge so much more because the consumer will pay it. Simple economics.
As to the point of this story, me and 3 of my buddies could probably design and layout a service that could scale as well as @Home needed. It isn't particularly difficult to build a high volume, robust quality network. It's just expensive to do. I bet that guy didn't learn any new tricks while at @home and was in it to turn @home around.
-1 overrated
A lot of clueless +4,+5 posts on this thread tonight.
this two minute limit is a pain in the ass
if i had mod points today this wouldn't be a problem
This is a great troll. It should be added to the troll library. Alan_Thicke needs some competition.
Now if this isn't a troll I'd have to say this cunt is A rEaL fAt AsS! This kind of female (the term woman is kind when discussing sea beasts. Use gender only) is probably the kind that sits at home on a friday night with a whole bag of hershey's kisses and watches that shitty fucking stand up on Comedy Central. I would expect about 3 minature poodles that have off-white fur from wallowing in their own filth running around and pissing on the empty birdcage in the corner.
The concept of a "boyfriend" often refers to a dildo that has a name written down the side.
Shame really. Chubby chasers pay top dollar for "pig fucks" like this. I know I could trick her pussy out for no less than $30.
Have fun.
OMG BIG PENIS ATE MY SOUP
It's easy to blame the demise of @Home on troubles with its contracts with MSO's, but the simple truth is poor fiscal management:
1. @Home had several dozen completely useless and highly expensive software projects. Platform, Messenger, Self Install Kit, its own browser, and its own Email client just to name a few. Each of these projects would chew up on average of a few million dollars per year.
2. @Home signed 15-year leases at TOP MARKET RATE per square foot for TONS of office space that was never used. Anyone who visited building 425 in the last year of its existence could tell you it was at 50% capacity, as with every other building on its campus. And there were other buildings leased that were never even used.
3. @Home was never able to deploy a more automatic provisioning system. Nuff said.
Ok, so blame the unrenewed contracts all you want. But @Home died several years early because it was bleeding dollars from every which way. The three things I mentioned above accounts for hundreds of millions in cash simply burnt each year. Without these leaks, @Home would have been viable for several more years.
I only knew 2 people that had @Home "service" but they both had problems with @Home. Neither of them were running servers or anything else. They just wanted Internet connections and e-mail.
@Home could never get the connection for my friend's computer set up correctly. They couldn't get a dynamic IP address to work for him so they had to give him a static one. When Charter took over after @Home went belly-up, they had my friend's connection fixed in short order (with no changes on his PC) AND he's had much better bandwidth since then.
My cousin just knows how to surf the Web and read e-mail but she had problems, too. Her service was always unstable, at least until another company took it over. Her service has been rock solid since then.
I'm sure that there WERE users who were abusing the service but, more often than not, the service (or lack of it) was abusing the users...
As well as my favorite internet radio ...
db
Cig:
ôô
Besides the points already made:
Unless my understanding of IP is completely off, it seems to me that dynamic IP will allow them to serve more customers with the same pool of IP addresses (unless everybody is connected 24/7/365). Wheter this is a case of an evil company trying to make more money, or a company trying to keep costs down for their customers, I don't know. That's a different issue.
Furthermore, a changing IP address should give you a little bit of protection against hackers, right? I know it's no substitute for firewalls and all that, and yeah, Linux is Much Better Than Windows (TM), but it should make life a little harder for black hat hackers. Right?
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
AT&T killed at home. In fact they were intending upon profiting from the bankruptcy as well. They ran @home into the ground by expanding it and doing various infrastructure improvements, hoping to buy @home back for less than the debt once @ home went bankrupt. Thus AT&T would not only get rid of @home as a cable competitor, it would save on the always costly infrastructure in the process. However (as other slashdot stories testify) they did not get @home for the bargain price they were attempting to, as the judge in the case saw through it (I believe they tried to buy it for something like 300 million less than the debt @home declared). At least the judicial system is standing up to big buisness (at least the judges) unlike the rest of the bought out executive and legislative branches, but I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before some loophole allows corporations to "contribute" to judges.
I believe it was Colonel Mustard in the Study with the Lead Piping.
..."Build one to throw away"?
Looks like AT&T had a great prototype.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
i solved the problem by installing windows 2000, which works. yay.
It was Emperor Palp-AT&Tne, using the power of his fully operational Death-Logo ^_^
Maran
geesh this article hinted that the person did not have any conflict on building the network while working for @home...
im sorry i was young drunk i didnt understand that they were watching oh yes, they were watching. damn backstabbing 'hypertext transfer protocol' i shouldnt have realised all the signs where there he swerved to the right. i swerved to the left. it was all over in seconds. @home was gone. and with it, the hopes of 10's, nay, 100's of innocent squirrels, all lacking in the dns entries. and what for? a few round beads.
Well, did you know that 81% of slashdots hits are from MSIE? Thats right bucko... you're buddies are all a bunch of Microsoft users! Oh the horror! Almost like they're all a bunch of hypocrits or something... isn't it?
What, did Klerk's post widen the page in IE?
This Chick is hot and she smokes the weed. Help keep her out of prison [reneeboje.com]
Where do I go to contribute money to the prosecution's side?
As an early adopter in Cable Modem Technology since the hey days of 1995 as being one of the few orignal beta testers for Fremont. I have the answer to why @ home networks failed. One of the post's I've read already address this issue and indeed it has to do with Basic Accounting. After my intial testing of the technology, I thouhgt to myself, cool this is worth my $40.00 a month and I've had their service for 5 years after that. But One problem! Not once did I ever get billed from @ HOME or TCI at the time. The only time I started to recieve a bill is when ATT took over the service and that was just in 2000. I guesse my free ride is over, but oh well, you guys @HOME have the best technology for $0.00 for five years for free service. They did charge me for the inital install but no monthly service charge, what a deal! :)
-Nael
Good things comes to those who wait!
This whole thing seems simple enough to me. AT&T had some share of @Home due to it buying a cable company so they said hey lets see if we can make this thing work because it will be less expensive for us due to the fact that we will get some money back for the other companies that use @Home as well.
They send in their top guy and make the network go from shitty to great in a matter of months and then @Home says oh shit we are still running in the red we need more money. AT&T says hey lets buy them out this way we make money off our own subscribers and money off Cox and everyone else that uses @Home plus everything is already there cause our guy built it.
They offer money and @Home is dumb and keeps asking for more and does some stupid stuff to drag their feet. AT&T says shit we hae 805k customers that are going to get pissed if this network goes down so we should make our own network (not like they have not been making networks before they were even called networks).
Now @Home share holders are feeling retarded because they wanted more money and now they are going to end up with nothing at all so they complain that AT&T did something , when in reality AT&T prolonged them going under.
--MD--
I'm sure a lot of people are upset about this. They may not have their cable up and running for a bit, but I would urge them to consider how much better it can be with a little restructuring. If you had a good experience with @Home then fine, but a lot of us didn't and are glad to be using more local (if you can call ATT local) providers. These more local carriers are likely more efficient and will offer more reliable service. At the end of last year when ATT split from @Home my connection was down for a few days. Believe me it was hell. But ATT got it back up in half the predicted time of a week and I have had ZERO problems since. They even gave every customer some online gift certificates (real.com and ebags.com). I won't use them but it's a nice gesture, especially after the comletely abismal customer service (or lack of) @Home offered.
Just my $0.02
sig
We've managed to Slashdot @Home!
:)
Of course, their webserver's probably an old tin can with an 8086 running off of a 56k dialup (I mean, at this point, can they afford anything else?
I tried to download the Internet to a floppy.
Sorry.
Even with high-speed access to the internet, there is no substitute for browsing my university's library.
.PDF file over my broadband connection in the space of five minutes and search it.
My university library (Mariott at University of Utah, a notable research university) has 3.5 million volumes, over 1 million photos, 14,000+ journals, 180,000+ maps, a 50,000+ rare books collection, crammed into 500,000 square feet of space...
But compare the list of journals that it carries in my subject area (10-15) compared to the actual number of journals out there in the world in my subject area (50+) and I still need to use additional sources to get at the remaining information somehow.
No university can afford to carry EVERY journal in EVERY subject. Of course I can always have the journal volume/issue I need sent from another school. All I have to do is wait days for it to arrive, only *then* to find out if I can even *use* the paper or article in question... Or I can grab the related
Which would you rather do?
Sure, things like email may have made some things easier to do. Unfortunately, many people have come to believe that they are absolute necessities.
Are you in the real world? As an undergrad, I was required to submit fully half of my assignments by e-mail. Computer access and e-mail were not optional; if you didn't want to do it, you could just go home.
The world is changing. Sure, telephone access is not, strictly speaking, necessary either...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Who the hell needs any help figuring out what killed @Home? Let me make it simple: Wasting billions of dollars buying, promoting, supporting, and maintaining Excite.com. Excite was just another knockoff of Yahoo/Altavista when @Home bought it. @Home never had a chance of @Home bringing in enough customers to recoup the cost, and since Excite had no chance of being inherently profitable, the whole thing was just a huge waste of money, quickly draining the life out of a company with an otherwise brilliant future.
I was an @Home customer for a while in Illinois... never once even went to the site. They came in, dropped the modem, told me to use DHCP, did a line test, and I was up and running. Onlye one IP, but NAT was not against the rules and neither was a firewall/router box. I uncapped it the next day and saw an average download speed in excess of 500K during any given time of the day, and this was in an apartment building full of techies and @home customers.
Problem was when AT@T got in the scene... they culled their bandwith and killed accounts with suspected servers on them, double billed, and refused tech support. They couldn't keep an email server up for more than 24 hours at a time, and they got rid of the the news server. Only good thing they did was ban accounts using Linux.
Well, the whole point of being a cable modem user is that you are connected 24/7/365.
I have to agree that the reason why they use DHCP and dynamic ip addresses is because it's easy and it discourages from you running a server.
In many jurisdictions, it is within their rights to send you a bill for $2400. It gets worse if they charge you 7% interest per year: and worse yet if they compute it continuously:
When I signed up for Excite@Home, a few years ago, the service was very good - speed was high, and outages infrequent. When AT&T started to intervene there was a significant service degradation. At the time they took over a few months ago, service became awful. So much so that keeping it was more trouble than it was worth.
I don't know in other aspects but, in this particular one, AT&T sucks big time.
and if they are mod me down. But here are the facts.
.. @Home should have stuck to the basics and became a pipe. Not to mention should have snuggled themselves really close to Yahoo and went into a partnership with them.
.. you heard me .. AT&T destroyed this company because they wanted the broadband. In 1999 they bough a portion of @Home and were in control of it. So many people do not pay attention to this fact. AT&T found it more beneficial to destroy @Home and switch over the subscribers then by out the remaining shares of the other cable companies.
1) Overspending. They thought there stock would go to 1000000. Spend, Spend, Spend.
2) Excite. 6 BILLION!!! in cash and stock swap. OBTW, Excite was sold off a few months ago for $175,000
3) AT&T YES
Hey, for what its worth @Home was great. I will be honest, I had the service for 4-5 years and ALWAYS had a static IP address (though they liked changing it around now and then). Service was always up, and could do whatever I wanted.
Well as we know times are changing, but if anything, from the way things look, I am happy to be a Cox customer then any of the others.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
I was involved in the migration of users from @H0me to the C0mcast solution and I found out a couple things. Apparently, C0mcast owned the controlling shares of @h0me with the rest being owned by ATT and c0x cable. There was a clause in the partnership agreement between these three companies that entitled c0mcast to dissolve @h0me at any time. It seems that c0mcast was no longer interested in sharing broadband ownership with these other companies, so they decided to wreck @h0me in order to implement a new service that they will totally own.
The problem here is that there were a bunch of people running Excite@home; at least after the merger with a vision of the internet as the next generation of television broadcasting. Commercially produced content from central servers was gonna rule. Combine multimedia formats + the bandwidth to transmit them clearly and become a media conglomerate (overnight, please)
Cable companies have their own vision of what they think the net should be, or, more precisely, the direction they wish to steer their subscribers contractually, and in marketing terms. This is still unfolding now, but enough has transpired since November to illustrate their desire for an AOL-type service of tight user control: overmanaged, overintrusive, restricted to the point of uselessness and treating their customers as a byproduct of their business goal of selling information about them and their preferences and interests to marketeers. How well is this working out? Going by the fact that there are so many millions of complaints they can't afford or maintain supervisory control over the staff to answer them all is an indication their surefire plan to become overnight billionaires isn't very likely to happen either.
Customers who use the net know what they want to use the net for, and in almost all cases it isn't television nor a substitution for a trip to a shopping mall. ISPs, and especially broadband ISPs who just get that point and provide a reliable affordable carrier will succeed in the long run - not become billionaires overnight (which is a flaky ambition anyway) but they'll be around 10 years from now.
Another good analytical article is posted here on C|net
The really ironic thing is that the architects of the original @home network got it so right. I used it here for 2 and a half years and recommended it because it was demonstrably competitive: Static IP, OS agnostic real and complete internet, and the service was reliable - not perfect, but reliable. That's competitive.
The replacement comcast.net service unfortunately isn't, but I'm fortunate to be within DSL range so was able with some effort to move everything of mine over to these guys and so for me at least for now, all is well.
@home got it right, but it got derailed by a societical bollock stew of venture capitalists, pundits, investors, cable companies, regulators (by doing nothing) and finally it reached baknruptcy court which did the best they could with the mess; leading to my question:
Is America failing?
give me a
I got a handful of Acceptable Use Policy violation notices from @Home for messages I had posted to Usenet, and even had my service cut off completely once. All this despite the fact that I was complying with the posting guidelines in the relevant newsgroups.
@Home made no effort to check the validity of the claims against me. They (both the complainant and @Home) said I was "spamming and disrupting the group", even though I was doing neither.
The kicker is that I didn't even receive notice of these violations until my pipe got shut off, because they emailed the notices to an email address THAT DIDN'T EXIST. My username was (mumblemumble)1@home.com, they sent them to (mumblemumble)2@home.com, an account I never created. They apparently created it FOR me after the first message bounced, I guess -- later on I was able to log into the POP server using that account name and get my mail.
Horrible, horrible, unfair behavior.
check out dns2go. Works like a champ for me, and they have a linux client.
People analyze this merger as if it had anything to do with improving a consumer product...get real folks, KPCB saw the ship sinking and just wanted to cash out for more money beofre it tanked completely.
I day I heard that every one of our markets in the entire state was ditching @Home was the day I told everyone I knew to sell all of their @Home stock.
If your employer was a public company, chances are that they asked you to agree to their insider trading policy. If you really did tell your friends, this would probably be considered insider trading (you had insider knowledge regarding @Home's future) and this could get you investigated by the SEC.
I'm not an expert on securities law (IANAL) but this might be considered insider trading even if your employer was not publicly traded and if you didn't sign any agreements regarding insider information.
Achtung.
A few weeks before @Home service was disabled in my area, I already got switched over to Optonline using my existing cable modem. I just had to reboot my server [not that I run one using a broadband connection *whistle*] and got a new IP addy which was on Optonline's service.
Anyways, a few weeks before, they sent me a conversion kit which included a brand new cable modem! I thought that I could use my current modem, but eventually that stopped working and had to switch to the new modem.
I still have the old one... I guess it makes a nice paper weight. Needless to say, I was very happy with the transition. I should add they didn't charge me for the new modem.
Live web cams
soon I will be able to pay not to see an ad with this junk article ...
Business customers and certain assets of @Work, the business services arm of @Home, have been acquired by Vancouver, WA, based New Edge Networks, and will be merged with their resale arm, TransEdge.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Use dynamic dns and get over it.
The article is a bunch of hooey. Sales killed @home. They set a price which was so low that they'd have to supplant UU-Net as the peering king before even a frugal infrastructure would be cost-effective enough to function on their revenue stream. The rest of it is politics and red-herrings.
Few ISPs employ cost analysts, and fewer still pay any attention to them. That finally caught up with the industry these past 12 months, and companies where sales had triumphed over sense paid the price.
"Economy of scale" is an analysts' term. You shouldn't use it to justify a price if you havn't done the math.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
In a shocking display a humor, a slashdot poster posts a one line comment and is immediately moderated up to 5. A moderater responded, on condition of anonyminity, "It's more important that comedians get the +2 bonus than people who have real thoughts to add. Besides, it's just slashdot. It's not like anyone reads it for the news or comments anyway."
In short, I guess Slashdot and the whole culture it spawned just fascinates the hell out of me, and I thought it was about time I contributed to it. Hopefully my insecure computer bumblings aren't TOO hard to deal with for geniuses like you :-)
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I'm wasted and I can't find my way home...
Prof. Plumb, in the study, with the rope.
You're right, Linux doesn't support AOL or winmodems, and because of this I can't use Linux as my primary operating system. I'd love to get a real modem and a real ISP, but I don't have the cash for it. I can't believe how thickheaded and self-righteous you are. I can still learn to use a Unix system without Internet access under that system. I can know that my hardware is shit without being a "troll". Unfortunately, YOU can not see beyond your own small-minded pettiness.
The current take over of the net by ATT, AOL/Time Warner, Microsoft and friends will destroy it. That will make all them happy. I will serve untill they turn my connection off.
Don't be so fatalistic. The fact that wonderful, community-driven sites like Slashdot exist and thrive should be proof enough to you that the Internet is still firmly in the hands of the end users. While corporate-packaged portals like Excite, msn, and Netscape wither away and die, user-moderated and peer-contributed sites like Slashdot, LiveJournal, and Kuro5hin continue to grow and thrive at unprecedented rates. Everyday another technically adept, ambitious writer downloads Slashcode or another weblog system and starts his own site.
Much like modern music, art, and pop culture, the corporate-owned, glossy stuff only seems to be taking control because it's most visible. They pay for it to be visible. It's not hard to look past the screen of Britney Spears and the Pepsi Generation and see that regular old people are still producing plenty of worthwhile content.
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I'm wasted and I can't find my way home...
Well, the whole point of being a cable modem user is that you are connected 24/7/365.
Interesting. For me it's the speed. I don't really need to be connected all the time. I usually switch my computer off when I'm not using it. Everyone has their own requirements, I guess.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
I want to know why in the world I can't get just the internet connection without the email address, webspace, etc etc etc. All I want to be able to do from ATTBI is surf the internet. I have my own domain with my own email address and my own web hosting service. I would gladly give up my email addresses, webspace, etc etc and save a few bucks in the process.