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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?
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!
... 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.
They still need to come back and put the screws back into my chasis that they took out.
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.
--
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
No joke. The amazing thing about @Home was that they were all so damn arrogant, but didn't know $#!+.
I worked for a CMTS vendor for almost five years, and every contact with @Home was an exercise in insanity.
1: We were installing gear at an @Home site, and needed changes in the routing made to light up the new gear. Called the NOC a dozen times over the two days I was onsite with no response. I finally turned off one of the (redundant) power supplies on the @Home 7200 in the headend. Sure enough, the NOC called us within a minute. I had the guy who called find the Routing Diva (that's what her card said!) before I turned the supply back on.
2: They were constantly beating us up to make sure that the modems wouldn't bind to IP addresses learned from ARP, since then you could just statically configure an IP address you wanted to steal. No, they insisted that we sniff DHCP, that way their magical DHCP-integrated-with-billing server could be authoritative. We actually preferred using DHCP to ARP (since we had to relay DHCP anyway) and added a switch to disable learning from ARP. So far so good, except that their DHCP implementation was non-standard. It completely ignored giaddr, and assigned the IP based on client ID. (That caused countless other problems, as you might imagine...) Fine, except that the Client ID was also the hostname in @Home's DNS.
For those of you who lack a devious mind, this means that all you had to do was a reverse lookup on the address you wanted to steal, enter that as your client ID, and the DHCP would assign you the address you stole.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
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.
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...
Assuming he is guilty of this, it depends. If your goal is to cause the company to be devalues so seriously you can pick up their assets at a fraction of the cost, you want to disrupt their service in any way you can.
But more to the point, why is everyone here being so quick to condemn this guy. While I agree it is an odd situation, this is a pretty serious charge, and I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Basically, I think that @Home were idiots. They made some really bad business decisions (Excite). Their cable partner contracts were poorly done, leaving them at a huge disadvantage when negotiating contract renewals. The "new economy" was crashing down around their ears, cutting into new subscriber rates, and DSL was aquiring a reputation for much better quality of service. AT&T gave them a not unreasonable buy out bid, but the @Home bondholders refused to accept that distressed assets sell at bargain prices. AT&T took their ball and went home, and @Home got nothing.
On the other hand, it is almost laughable to consider the possibility tht AT&T needed to spy on the fragile and unreliable @Home infrastructure to figure out how to make a nationwide network.
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...
I don't need a car!
I don't DO any of those things, and neither do most of my friends. Put yourself in an average agorophobic person's shoes, and think about what you just said:
Shopping: 20 minutes of driving to the mall via car == 6 hours walking.
Why would your average person drive all the way to the mall when there are plenty of convenience stores within walking distance, and you can pretty much order anything by catalog anyway? You can't underestimate the importance of exercise, something which driving will never be able to replicate.
Mail use: 15 minutes to drive to the post office, 4 hours walking.
Why would I ever go to the post office? If something gets shipped to me and I miss it, I'll just do a chargeback on my credit card and let FedX try to deliver it again.
Research: 10 minutes to drive to the library == 3 hours to walk there, 4 hours to walk back with an armload of books.
Once again, I would probably just make up facts like every other respectable college student before I tried to drive to a library. I mean, who does their research in a library? And who needs to do research anyway? Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten.
Please realize that people like you who depend on your cars for everything are a minority. There is a market for big bloated SUVs in your demographic, sure, but my point was that this demographic wants to jog around until their feet bleed more than GM thinks, and it is market forces that killed the Pinto.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Great! So now I only need to change my MAC address to steal someone else's IP....
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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'm running Charter Pipeline now, after the @home death. My connection is substantially slower, averaging 50k/s. Lots of dropped connections, I think the lease for their DHCP is set to 15 minutes. My cable modem rarely stays connected more than 2 days at a time. I originally had Charter Pipeline for my hosting busness about 3 years ago. I dropped out of a 2 year contract because of absolutely shitty service. I'm going to drop them again for the same reason. Luckily, I can get DSL at our new house.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
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 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.
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
From 4.3.1:
DHCP is supposed to listen to giaddr, but it is allowed to assign a different address. The problem is that if you start doing this, you're very likely to end up assigning addresses to clients that can't be routed from the network where the client is located. @Home did this a lot, since they were trying to pick IP addresses for clients by looking at street addresses, cross referencing those to cable plant maps provided by the operators, and finally trying to correlate that with what they believed was the network configuration in the cable operator's headend. This worked about as well as you'd expect. The giaddr field would at least tell you what network the packet came from.
To your spoofing comment, DHCP shouldn't be used for authentication. Period. giaddr is harder to spoof because it's usually written by a relay agent. Client ID is written by a user typing into the "Computer Name" field. Which do you think is more secure?
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
The other wonderful thing was having Mr. "I am a fucking network engineer" call up saying, "you don't need that computer name, I demand your supervisor!"
This is a direct result of conditioning by barely-literate front-line tech support.
I am a network engineer, and when I call tech support, I usually have a pretty good idea what's wrong. It's mind-numbing to call tech support to tell them that the DHCP offers coming from their server don't have the router option populated, and be asked if the modem is plugged in. By the time I reach someone with a clue, I'm usually out of patience.
Of course, I understand this completely. Anyone with a clue (myself included, once upon a time) doing tech support for end users (when most of the time the modem really isn't plugged in) will go completely batty in a week.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
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.
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."
Hmmm, I thought you were a liar. Strange that you can afford the hard drive space for two operating systems and AOL, but not a second modem or a more reasonable ISP. After all, with a $5 used hayes modem and for what you pay AOL you could find a more normal ISP that would provide non propriatory communications and connect under Linux. I'm also unaware of any Xchat clients for windoze. Looked rather trollish. Suppose I could be wrong though, the windows concerns are far away and long ago. Excuse granted. Appology offered under excuse: there are too many fucking trolls wrecking this site.
My petty concern is that everyone, even you, can serve your own message board, mail and whatnot. Slashdot is a nice news site and place to meet, but we should expect more. The internet was largly built with tax money and companies that were protected by government sactioned exclusive contracts. It belongs to us, not ATT, M$, AOL, or even VA Linux. Consider your ability to express yourself with your own equipment on the pull media that the internet a right.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.