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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 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
... 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.
Cable modems are more than just a speed improvement. For many people, the always-on access is very convenient. Some of the cost of broadband is saved by eliminating a second phone line. Another important benefit for many users is the ability to share the connection with multiple computers in one household.
After switching to broadband, I simply can't go back to dialup access. I've been forced to use or test it occasionally, and even the most trivial web surfing seems painfully slow. It's like being used to a remote control on a tv for fast channel switching and having to go up to the tv each time you want to change the channel. You get used to it, and all these things combined make it worth the price.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
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.
Err .. a few glaring errors:
.. thats far from 50% as your average cable company charges $45-$50 a month.
... they were essentually a reseller. They leased lines from the 5 major backbones, and in turn acted as a gateway between the cable companies and those backbones .. more or less getting them a 'volume' discount.
.. the contracts probally HELPED the end consumer, as cable franchises we're not allowed to go above a certain price cap, and we're not allowed to sell 'tiered services (like business lines at business rates'. After @Home said it was gonna go bust .. whats the FIRST thing all the cable companies did. Answer: raise their rates .. when the lawyers got no $$ .. you automagically win in court.
.. not to these imagined things.
Cable companies paid @Home $13.00 a subscriber
@Home didn't build anything
@Home's contracts were for being part of the @Home franchise. {still recogonizable} and for their hosting e-mail and web space. thats it.
In all actualily
When you throw on top of that Beer-Day Fridays, free massages, and the Sucking black hole which is Excite.com, thats where the $$ went
Once Excite came online, those vampires sucked @Home for every penny. I had to deal with no less than FOUR account reps once a week for about 3 months just to sync up our local market homepage 'headlines' with their main page. Thats a lot of wasted man hours that could have been avoided with 1 simple statement.
[Did I mention there was a slide in the main office, made it easier to get downstairs on Beer-Day Friday]
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Yep, the home page only existed on the LAN and was not accessible from off of the network. It cost @home no extra bandwidth money. Plus there weren't "daily movies" and "high bandwidth" content. Personalization was stored in the same way that any profile for a website is stored. You login and the page changes according to the preferences you set. This didn't use much bw at all.
dhcp isn't supposed to listen to giaddr. Since
giaddr can easilly be spoofed it adds no further
security than just listening to clientID. This
is the way it's supposed to be.. check yer RFCs.