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."

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Anonymous Coward]

I just used Win2000 DHCP, and used the IP numbers from ipconfig to plug into my linux firewall, then switched windows back to 192.168.0.3
Working fine for the past 2.5 days (Seattle)

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

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:Well Boulder (and probably Denver area)..

[Anonymous Coward]

I am part of the AT&T crew, and you should be up tonight. We are working our tails off to get the network elements in place and have everyone migrated ASAP...I believe that we will be done by Thursday evening.

I do feel bad for our customers, and our customer service folks, that they got caught up in this pissing match between Excite@home and AT&T Broadband.

Re:we need regulation -- NOW

[corbettw]

This is wrong on so many levels it's painful to read. But all I'm going to point out is that California's energy crisis was not the result of deregulation, as it never occurred. What really happened is that the State told power resellers they could only charge a fixed amount for power, but wholesalers could charge whatever they wanted. This led to power utilities selling energy for *less then they paid for it*. There's no way any company can stay in business very long under those circumstances.

Given that example of government interferance in the market, why do you think anything different would happen if they got their dirty hands into the Internet business?

Re:Was it worth it ?

[jonathan_ingram]

So what do you pay for the 1.5Mpbs service you're complaining so much about? Over here in the UK it's £40-50 ($60-70) a month for 512 down / 128 up.

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 [att.com] 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:Several things to watch out for with the instal

[The Bungi]

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.

That's because it reinstalled the Windows Scripting Host.

Open the registry entry for all script files (WSF, VBS, JS and so on) and set the default action (on the root of the registry tree for the file type) to EDIT instead of OPEN. All you ever get when a script worm hits are tons of instances of Notepad. This is not affected by updates to the WSH, which only looks to see if the file associations are correct, not which one of the shell commands is the default.

If you think about it, this is the cheapest possible anti virus agent designed specifically for script worms =)

Re:AT&T & Static IP's

[Julian Plamann]

I am operating on the new at&t connection right now. My service is exactly the same as previous (besides hostname and IP. I have a static IP, so far as I can tell, 128kbps upload and uncapped download (just downloaded Linux-2.4.16 at about 400-500K/sec)
However, my connection has been dropping and re-connecting every few minutes since the switch. This is only noticable in sensitive programs like IRC. I'm sure this will go away once the new network has had a few days to stabilize.

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.