@Home Post Mortem: Who or What Killed @Home? 224
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 did the same thing (Score:2)
Hmm.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmm.. (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously you never discovered why the dot-com business took off so well...
...er, nevermind.
Re:Hmm.. (Score:2)
While I don't doubt that this will provide entertainment^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Heducation for an entire generation of MBAs, I don't think it's beyond the grasp of the average beginning accounting student. Or, for that matter, someone who has never had accounting but understands a balance sheet and cash flow.
What I know... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:What I know... (Score:2)
I'm not complaining, though. I'm happy with my service, and they did an amazing job swapping us over to the new ISP in record time.
Re: (Score:2)
XP (Score:1)
Re:What I know... (Score:2)
Have you applied all of these tweaks [speedguide.net] or these [speedguide.net] and maybe these [speedguide.net]? I had similar problems with my cable modem. I was getting about 1.8 Mbps with my Win2K machine and 4.5 Mbps with my Linux boxes. Adding the appropriate registry tweaks gave me about equivalent performance with the W2K machine. Note that not all of these tweaks are good for all types of network access, so depending on your usage patterns, your mileage may vary.
Internet^2 (Score:1)
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
Ummmm... (Score:1)
Needlessly redundant?
Re:What I know... (Score:2)
-
@Home's initial business model was driven in large part by John Malone and TCI. @Home ran a PC-oriented high-speed IP service on top of the cable companies' local fiber and coax networks. @Home ran the business, owned the high-speed customer, and sent money back to TCI (and other cable companies that they signed up). When the cable companies found that there were more things that they wanted to do with IP than just sell bandwidth to PC owners (advanced set-top boxes and voice-over-IP are two), @Home was quite uncooperative about it. Pissing off the companies whose wires you depend on is not a smart thing to do.
-
@Home decided that they were going to be a content company moreso than a transport company. They paid insanely high prices for Excite (a portal with not that much of its own content) and Blue Mountain Arts (free online greeting cards) among others. When the dot-com bubble collapsed, @Home suffered the same staggering losses that took down many other companies.
Note the actions of large cable companies other than TCI/AT&T-- Time Warner and MediaOne created RoadRunner, and kept tight control of it so they could do what they wanted on the IP network. Comcast and Cox gave @Home notice that they would be withdrawing and operating their own IP networks well before it became obvious that @Home was in a death spiral.To summarize, @Home ignored the fact that they needed to make themselves a valuable partner for the cable companies, not an adversary. And in my opinion, they made some really bad choices about content versus transport.
ahaha! (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words, he was actually good at it?
I don't know but.. (Score:1)
Who killed @Home? (Score:5, Funny)
Back and to the left...
Re:Who killed @Home? (Score:1, Funny)
.
Re:Who killed @Home? (Score:2)
FBI Agent: 'Are you trying to stall us, or are you just senile?'
Grandpa: 'A little from column "A", a little from column "B".
----
Me: Just remember... 'Futurama' is gone, 'Family Guy' is gone, but 'King of the Hill' is still going strong. What the hell is wrong with the world?
Re:Who killed @Home? (Score:2)
Re:Who killed @Home? (Score:2)
Future Troll Gains +5 Karma (Score:2)
Campus networks (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Campus networks (Score:1)
heh. Too bad they don't offer financial aid to geeks that need T1 lines.
Interesting that this story comes on the same day as the House passes the Broadband legistlation bill [reuters.com]. The article makes an excellent point: Hollings, champion of the SSSCA [acm.org], will probably kill it when it gets to the Senate.
Re:Campus networks (Score:2)
Lea
Possible reason (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Possible reason (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Possible reason (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Possible reason (Score:2)
Re:Possible reason (Score:2)
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.
Re:Possible reason (Score:2)
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?
I live very close to @Home.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I live very close to @Home.... (Score:1)
Consipracy theories aside, I think everyone has pointed out how bad the Excite aquisition was for @home. That seems to be the clearest cause of failure for @home. The rest is just ruthless business practice (the move from @home.com to attbi.com was relatively painless).
Re:I live very close to @Home.... (Score:2)
Sounds like the rumour that some of the bondholders are desperately trying to spread.
I really have no sympathy for the bond holders. AT&T offered a fair price for the network, there were no other bids. The bond holders went to court to force the reciever to reject the AT&T offer in the hope they could force AT&T to pay more. AT&T walked away and built their own.
The idea that AT&T don't know how to build an IP network, or don't even know who to hire to build one is just wierd. AT&T owns the fibre over which most IP gets sent in the US. They always had the ability to walk away. The bondholders were just too greedy to realise it.
Equally much of the @Home network would have be co-loced at the cable TV service heads. The idea that AT&T would need to engage in espionage is plain silly. It would be their own facilities.
IP was designed to allow the military to lash networks together quickly and cheaply while under fire. If you have unlimited bandwidth a company like AT&T should be able to deploy with a couple of months planning and a large cheque book.
As for why @Home went down, any capital intensive company that buys another loss making capital intensive company is destined for bankrupcy.
it was me, sorry. (Score:5, Funny)
@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.
You're both wrong... (Score:1)
As well as my favorite internet radio [radioparadise.com] ...
well duh (Score:1)
He wouldn't want to do anything to damage a future corporate aquisition, now would he?
Re:well duh (Score:2)
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.
What really killed @Home... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What really killed @Home... (Score:2)
That was local cached content. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What really killed @Home... (Score:1)
For this to be plausible, you have to be able to pretend that @home customers would sit around whilst this crappy homepage loaded, when everybody and his dog knows how to set a page to be their homepage. It's an interesting thought, though. Could they have saved money by sacking their content producers?
Re:What really killed @Home... (Score:1)
You'd be surprised.
Re:What really killed @Home... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What really killed @Home... (Score:2)
Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2, Flamebait)
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.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2, Funny)
When I would dial up, I would have the strangest sense that I absolutely had to get done what I was doing, ignoring the kids and wife. I just couldn't stand disconnecting and then redialing later. Now I don't mind if I get interrupted for any reason at
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:1)
When you talk about "always-on access," you may be forgetting that it works both ways. With a broadband connection, DNS, and dirt-cheap domain name registration [godaddy.com], any somewhat-geek can install Apache and serve homepages right from their home computer. I'm certainly doing it.
I've taken this a step further. I have a P200 "used to be mom's computer" running console debian, apache, samba, and IP-MASQ. Samba allows me to mount up the 4 other computers in my house (most of which are Windoze). Using a domain name, I can quickly and easily get access to all the files on all the computers on my network. No muss, no fuss, no IPs to remember. Talk about convenience!
You simply couldn't utilize a dial-up connection for these purposes. For me, broadband is quickly dissolving the lines between my computer and anyone else's. I pull up a browser, hook into my VNC, and I'm working off of my own computer. Or, I download files and use local apps while I'm at school, then shoot it back up to my computers at home when I'm done.
Not to mention all the crazy crap that my roommate downloads every day through Morpheus.
For all the things I'm now using Broadband for, could I go back to Dial-up? I'd rather take a sharp stick in the eye than go back to carting floppies around. But don't tell my cable company I'm violating pretty much every rule they have in their little TOS.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
IF you spend any amount of time using the 'net, you need broadband.
Web use: 1 hour of 'net christmas shopping via broadband == 6 hours of 'net christmas shopping over a modem.
Mail use: 200 e-mails a day == 30 seconds to check via broadband, 10 minutes to check via modem.
Research: 100
Software: 1 download of Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenOffice, Your Favorite Game Demo == 10 minutes to 1 hour via broadband, NEVER (good luck!) via modem.
It's no more correct to say that all consumers don't need broadband than it is to say that all true Americans are christians.
You missed my point. (Score:1)
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.
No, your conceptions of "average" are off. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:You missed my point. (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:1)
You've bought the hype, hook, line, and sinker.
If your main use for the web is email and web browsing, the speed-up is almost guaranteed not to be worth it. Think about it: when browsing the web, how much time is spent waiting for downloads as opposed to reading content?
Let's say the average pattern is: 10 seconds download on a modem, 10 seconds reading before the next link is clicked. Speed is: 3 pages/minute. With broadband, figure 10x improvement in download speed (which is more optimistic than your idea). You get 1 second downloading, but 10 seconds reading content, still. New rate: 5.5 pages/minute, which is not even a speed-doubling. Granted, look ahead caching is an option, but that, afaict, will not be a cure-all, especially what with the quantities of non-static content on the web that comes from forms.
This all changes if you're transferring large files in a non-interactive manner (ftp, p2p, etc.). There, the bandwidth is well worth it.
The better buyer of Napster would have been either AOL, AT&T, or some other large ISP. Think about it: if AT&T bought them, they could do things like sell a premium media package that included their own Napster proxies to run faster searches. They could even play some games at the router level to make paying an extra $15/month for better Napster performance more of an option for their customers. They'd also have the cash to go toe to toe with the RIAA and muddy the waters.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:1)
I don't do much reading on the Web. Really on the Web I do two things almost exclusively: 1) Shop. Books, bookshelves, CDs and CD players are all often half-price bought online. Shopping on the Web is almost entirely clicking and very little reading. 2) Download. Articles, research papers, documents, manuals, e-texts for my PDA, images that are going to press and photos of my friends' kids, etc. Again, no reading, all waiting for the download to finish.
The extent of my reading in a browser window falls across two sites, Slashdot.org for Linux-bias tech news (yes, I want it that way) and news.bbc.co.uk for news beyond what CNN can give me.
Really, the time I save shopping and downloading is enough to justify broadband for me. My PC probably spends a good 12-15 hours over the course of a month downloading files (esp. PDF documents and full-res digital photos or scans of all kinds, some using a browser, most in e-mail) via my cable connection. That's around 600+ hours of continuous download a month if I had to do it over a modem. You try keeping a modem-based connection up 25 straight days out of every month!
More to the point, not having broadband would probably mandate serious lifestyle changes or even career changes for me, as much of what I do wouldn't be practical if I didn't have a fast 'net connection. At the very least, I'd be less productive by far and therefore less competitive as well.
But then again, why would I be less competitive? Because others would be using their broadband to get more things done! I think much of the western world these days depends on the 'net for the pace of everyday business and tasks. Some of my friends in marketing do nearly everything over the net (they practically live on it, and no, not just browsing) and they have broadband at home so that they can take work home with them and spend their time actually working, rather than waiting for images and documents to transfer and swearing when the carrier drops.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2)
Anyone who says speed isnt needed is smoking crack. I could make a bullet list and pretend I knew what I was talking about too. But the fact is, SLOW LINK = SLOW DOWNLOAD. My time and enjoyment is worth money. Maybe you want to surf at 56K (ha, if..) and wait minutes for pages to load, and get your ass kicked at RTCW or MOHAA. Myself, I need the speed, I use the bandwidth for content I create (Family Photos etc..), VOIP, Multiple people in the house surfing at once, and many more uses than I should even have to list.
@Home died because it was controlled by Control freaks. They strangeled it, they tortured it, they gave it away cheap, they abused thier customers, they took the money and ran.
Offer the customers what they want, not what you want to give them. Its not a damn monopoly, took them a while to learn it.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:1)
Yeah, but your boyfriend I bet needs all the bandwidth he can get, wink wink nudge nudge.
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2)
TV?
Oh, you mean that thing with commericals. . .
I got spoiled by online video before I even got broadband.
Then again if you are the braindead idiototic type who can sit in front of a TV screen and let your brain slowly ooze outside of your head, then so be it.
(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.
Re:I'm sorry (Score:1)
If you are not technically orientated, why the hell are you reading slashdot? For the Human Interest stories?
Oh well, never mind.
flamebait?! (Score:1)
Re:Broadband just isn't useful enough. (Score:2)
My boyfriend gave me a Linux CD for our anniversary in a vain attempt to get me interested in computers. I'm sorry to say, it worked; I'm hooked on IRC, Usenet, and hopefully now Slashdot.
What a fucking troll. AOL does not have a linux dial up client and no one can use winmodems under linux. That you call the Winmodem crappy and shit on everything free software stands for shows that you know what you say is as false as your pretended ignorance. Go away! Hopefully, Slashdot's new toll system will charge for all but anonymous posts and trolls like you will no longer be able to crap up Slashdot pages with self moderated blither like this.
Broadband, used properly has the potential to make all of us publishers, eliminate long distance bills, and share our lives and work with the world. One huge interconnected network of indepent peers, it's what the internets inventors dreamed of. The applications are now available for free in binary and source code distributions easy enough for a bone headed engineer like me to use.
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.
A new net must be built, but it looks like new and better laws will destroy that.
Re:Excuse me? (Score:2)
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.
Hire this guy.. (Score:1)
I know who did it (Score:2, Funny)
It was Colonel Mustard with a candle in the library. Duh.
Re:I know who did it (Score:1)
The problems are with the consumers (Score:1, Insightful)
That and idiots who like to complain about service being cut when they violate their TOS and run servers... idiots.
There's no low-bandwidth server option (Score:1)
...and not with their incompetence, huh? (Score:1)
@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...
Re:...and not with their incompetence, huh? (Score:2)
Great Questions. No Answers. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Not@home (Score:2)
tcd004
@Home died becuase of unrenewed contracts (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:@Home died becuase of unrenewed contracts (Score:5, Interesting)
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]
Re:@Home died becuase of unrenewed contracts (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you captain obvious! (Score:2)
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...
Re:@Home died becuase of unrenewed contracts (Score:2)
Depending on when you found out as opposed to when it was made public couldn't this be considered insider trading?
We'll make it our little secret;)
What You Just Said Is Potentially Illegal (Score:2)
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.
Re:What You Just Said Is Potentially Illegal (Score:2)
No worries.
(Hope I didn't sound like a dick or anything. I don't want to sound like I'm talking down to you. Just want to show my lack of worry and why. Cheers. )
One word... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One word... (Score:3, Insightful)
Only, whoops, AT&T wasn't bluffing! "Sorry, guys, we've got our own network; we don't need you anymore. Have fun in bankruptcy court." And everyone else soon followed suit. I bet that three hundred million AT&T was offering would look mighty good to those bondholders about now . . .
Re:One word... (Score:1)
Exactly. The Excite part was the dot.com snakeoil business. The @Home part should do just fine, there is plenty of money to be made in broadband internet access. I have a few friends who envy my ATTBI access. They would pay hard cash for it, but it's simply not offered (yet) where they live (no, they don't live out in the boonies). Same deal with DSL, too far from the local office, voice conditioning coils in the line, we're working on a solution, yada yada yada...
Long time coming. (Score:2, Funny)
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
I know what killed @home (Score:1)
To dispell some unfounded thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
@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.
Re:To dispell some unfounded thoughts (Score:1)
I was a @home customer for a few years.. now comcast.
The bit that always baffled me was if @home was operating at a loss, why purchase excite? In retrospect, that was the nail in the coffin - the contracts started to fall apart after.
The excite home page had a ceiling of users - @home subscribers - and the point was... click thru ads? When that revenue stream vanished - and I suspect @home was hit early and hard - the bond issues were floated - the creditors were then in control and the MSOs wanted out
And what did the MSO's have to do? Backbone, email and some web content (comcast dropped news servers). Most started planning when they indicated they would not renew last June - they could have started sooner, but @home had a contractual restriction that prevented the MSOs from developing their own backbone networks.
BTW, In 3 years with Comcast@home, I never had a price increase. That only came when the cutover took place (went up $5 but if you bought your modem, the price would be the same).
What AT&T pulled was a sham and if I read 'it was perfectly legal' again, I think I'll barf.
Re:To dispell some unfounded thoughts (Score:3)
My cable provider, Shaw [www.shaw.ca] starting building thier own netowrk at least a year before @Home ran into trouble. Thier transition was a lot simpler for people, they already had moved many of thier customers when the Chapter 11 was filed.
While I don't doubt that greed played a part in thier move, I think they were mostly embarassed. I can recall a 6 month period when you couldn't pay Everquest from 9:30pm till 1:00 am, one of @Home's router on the west cost crapped out on schedule, Every Night. Other network outages and strange behaviour were common, news servers were useless and email just vanished on a regular basis. If you tried to send someone in the Calgary tech community an email and they didn't recive it for 2 days, or it just disapeared nobody was surprised. I was on the phone with a recruiter one day who should have recived my resume a couple days previously, she was wondering where it was. All I had to say was @Home, she just said, "Oh yeah, that happens all the time, do you have Hotmail?"
I don't think it was any wonder at all that Shaw decided not to renew.
Other mistakes (Score:1)
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.
Who Loses? Everybody! (Score:1)
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.
A good reason to mourn the loss of @home (Score:1)
Re:A good reason to mourn the loss of @home (Score:1)
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.
Re:A good reason to mourn the loss of @home (Score:1)
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?
The Leader in Broadband (Score:4, Funny)
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 [be.com]...
ATT not so good (Score:1)
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
AT&T killed it in their interests (Score:1)
My Guess Is... (Score:1)
I believe it was Colonel Mustard in the Study with the Lead Piping.
Idiots... (Score:2)
Parts if not all are probably redundant ... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
I blame their useless Abuse department. (Score:2)
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.
It worked just fine...for its REAL purpose (KPCB) (Score:2)
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.
Got a free cable modem in switch from @Home (Score:2)
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.
@Work acquired by New Edge Networks (Score:2)