@Home Network Approaching Shutdown

David Harris writes: "A bankruptcy court ruled today that the @Home network will be shutdown at midnight, unless the company reaches new deals with its cable partners and creditors. The decision is a victory for bondholders, owed $750 million by Excite@Home, whose motion asked the court to shutdown the network on grounds that AT&T's $307 million offer to acquire @Home's broadband network is not adequate and fair value for the network could only be found if a shutdown was forced." Read about it on excite.com, while you can. CNet has a good analysis of where things stand. 45% of the cable modem users in North America! Ouch.

Not a surprise

[Walter Bell]

Given the fact that @home hasn't made a red cent since they started doing business (even in the roaring 90's), us customers should have known better than to not make backup plans in case they decided to pull the plug one day.

However, all is not lost. There are still many options for us:

• DSL. It's grown up into a fast and cheap alternative to the cable modems' "quick but spotty" service.
  
• 802.11b wireless. There are several wireless providers in my town. Pick one who has a QoS guarantee and be back online tomorrow.
  
• Satellite. DirecPC and Starband have matured into viable contenders in the past two years. Dialup-uplink doesn't even exist anymore. Sure, playing games will be slow, but games are wasteful of valuable bandwidth, especially given the current shortage.
  
• T1. Prices have gone down. Check out UUnet's latest offerings. A 768k frac T1 can be had for about $300/mo now, and the hardware is dirt cheap on ebay. No, it's not practical for personal use, but split it with your neighbors (via 802.11b) and it can be even cheaper than @home.
  
• Dialup. Due to many spammers, DDoS clients, and file sharers falling off the face of the internet tonight, even your 56k modem will be scads faster because the entire net will be more responsive.
  

This is going to be aggravating for all of us, but the ability to survive adversity separates the men from the boys. I wish you all luck this weekend getting your new service working.

~wally

Re:Goodbye Slashdot

[pete_p]

Use http://slashdot.org/index.pl?light=1

It'll load faster over sucky dialup :-D

Luckily, I won't be joining the dialup masses - yet. I'm at school. My parents, however, will. And guess who gets to talk them through changing settings over the phone? *sigh*

Roadrunner people are safe

[TwoStep]

If you are an AT&T customer that used to have mediaone/roadrunner, you aren't going to get shut down. AT&T sent me some snail mail about possibly loosing the "Excite@Home homepage" which is what they want to make your default homepage when they install. I can't say I care at all...

Twostep

Their own fault

[evenprime]

If they were a little more reasonable about their terms of service, they could have charged a little more. I would gladly have paid a small fee for the opportunity to run my own web server, or to talk to tech support people who didn't think my problems were due to not running windows. I moved to speakeasy [speakeasy.net] because I wanted a more freedom about what to do with my computers and didn't want to be treated like a clueless luser by people who naturally assume that if it is not windows, it is broken

Info for AT&T @ HOME customers

[tweakt]

Seems your @Home hosted pages might go down indefinately but AT&T claims no connectivity outtages no matter what happens. Details here: http://help.broadband.att.com/faq.jsp?content_id=1 118

Re:As seen on Excite

[Anonymous Freak]

...here is the official announcement from Excite:

Um, no. Just because it's on excite.com, doesn't make it official. It's actually an AP (Associated Press) newswire story that just about every news web site carries. It just so happens that Excite has a news web site (news.excite.com) that carried the story. It is exactly the same as when the cable television station MSNBC does a story on Microsoft. It's not an official statement from Microsoft, it's just a news organization reporting on a company, that, by coincidence, happens to be its parent company.

Before you post, please read this!

[steevo.com]

If you have a service with "@home" in the name, IT EFFECTS YOU!

Example, you are a subcriber to the "foo@home" cable Internet service, in Anywhere, North America, you are among us that are f***ed.

Info For Comcast@home customers

[FlaviusVarus]

Here is the info page for Comcast@home users

http://www.comcastonline.com/info.htm

Re:Canada?

[CyberBry]

No, Canada is fine. All Canadian cable ISPs who previously used @Home (Rogers, Shaw, and Cogeco) have already either completely severed their ties, or have a backup plan in place.

Re:Will I lost my access?

[gleffler]

Yes you will UNLESS you use their "Convert to Power Link" function, here. [24.48.59.187]
/gleffler

Re:AT&T@Home ~~ excite@Home?

[Anonymous Freak]

Yes. The way it works is alot like DSL. You get the physical line through the carrier (For DSL, it would be your local telephone company, such as Qwest, Verizon, Bell South, etc. For Cable, it would be AT&T, Cox, Comcast, etc.) but you get the internet service through the ISP. For DSL, you generally have your choice of ISPs (Most telcos have their own, plus EarthLink, DirecTV, and lots of local ISPs offer DSL service.) For Cable, you only have one choice. If you have AT&T cable, your only ISP choice is Excite@Home. They brand the service as AT&T@Home, Cox@Home, Comcast@Home, etc.. based on your cable company.

This could be huge for DSL

[ApoxyButt]

Well, maybe. It all depends on whether or not there's anybody waiting in the wings to fill the vacuum when Excite moves out.

I work in the digital loop carrier industry, and the technology exists to extend DSL broadband to people outside of the normal DSL range of a mile or so from the phone company's Central Office. The company I work for makes a box that allows phone companies to send all their voice and data over fiber (or copper, or wireless) to a remote terminal, and then it's from THAT point that the 1 mile limitation kicks in.

The problem for John Q. Dialup is that the phone companies are just too big and slow to put this technology out in the field. Our stuff is just now going through testing in SBC, but how long it will be before a large number of people can live 10 miles from the Central Office and still get DSL is anybody's guess.

Right now, many of the people with the best broadband opportunities are actually rural customers! This technology I'm talking about is pretty attractive to smaller Mom & Pop phone companies because due to the low initial cost of this particular product.

I got lucky: my aparment complex just happens to fall into one of SBC Ameritech's DSL sweet spots. I think when I get around to getting a house, I'm going to be looking very closely at the DSL availability!

Could it be?

[ouija147]

That this end of the Excite business is profitable and that bad investments are dragging down Excite@home?

On the ScreenSavers last night Leo Laporte stated that an insider told him that the service is extremely profitable and that the cable services are waiting for Excite to tank to take over the service for themselves.

Who knows for sure ...

Excite.com Isn't Going Away

[Servo5678]

According to this page [imgfarm.com] the Excite.com portal will live on after the shutdown.

Quote the site:

You may have recently read about issues with Excite@Home's broadband service. Don't worry. Excite.com and the broadband service are operated completely separately. Whatever you may hear about Excite@Home broadband, cable or ISP will have no affect on this site. You will continue to enjoy the same great content and personalized services. In fact, we're adding more fun and useful services to make Excite even better.

Is this right. News.com seems to disagree...

[sterno]

I just read the article [cnet.com] on news.com which discusses this ruling but it seemed to make clear two things:

1) that the parties must go back to the bargaining table
2) that the service being disconnected was unlikely

What it sounds like happened is that the judge said they can cut the contracts but there is nothing right now saying affirmatively that the service will be shut off. Basically this just means it is legal for excite to cancel the existing contracts so that they can re-negotiate them.

So I don't think excite is out yet...

Re:Info For Comcast@home customers

[Palin]

And if you service goes out you can call the information/message service @ 1-888-433-6963 for an update (it's a recording).

Re:Not a surprise

[Trifthen]

Let's take these one at a time, shall we?

• DSL: Too far from the CO in the middle of a God Damn business district. Yeah, right. Then I move to Illinois and Ameritech refuses to offer anything below Business class DSL which is very $$ consuming.
• 802.11b: Yeah right. Where do live, San Fransisco? In most parts of the country, this is still ignored or riding on unslated frequencies which means it can be turned off at any time.
• Satellite: Yeah, as soon as a few thousand/million people start logging onto these crap sattelites that are really 1980's technology someone realized could route internet packets, you'll start to realize just how invalid this option is.
• T1: I live in a duplex with my landlord. That would bring the price all the way down to $150 a month. Wow, what a bargain.
• 56k: Ah yes. Always an option for checking email. Unfortunately I like to work on my website occasionally which I upload via CVS. Oh, and forget downloading upgrades. I used to run a BBS on a 2400 baud modem back in the early 90's, so I know the agony of slow down/uploads. Besides that, here in Illinois, every call you make, local or otherwise, costs $0.05 per. Emergency only, not everyday use.

Yup. Lots of options. Hell, I was lucky to even get cable. All of these companies offering DSL or cable wonder why they fail miserably when people can't even sign up if they want to. Makes sense to me...

You can't tell me they weren't making a profit with at least 4 MILLION customers, especially when they're operating over ALREADY EXISTING cable infrastructure! What are they building their equipment out of, 24k gold?

Re:AT&T@Home == excite@Home?

[Xibby]

Will I experience any interruptions with my AT&T Broadband high-speed cable Internet service?
Your AT&T Broadband high-speed cable Internet service connectivity, e-mail and Personal Web pages will not be affected by Excite@Home's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. However, your home.excite.com home page may become temporarily unavailable.

What will happen to my high-speed cable Internet service if AT&T Broadband's proposal to purchase the Excite@Home network is not approved?
If the proposal to purchase the Excite@Home network is not approved, your home page content may be temporarily unavailable, but you will still have access to your e-mail and the Internet.

$16.00, not $39.95

[JohnQPublic]

According to the bondholders' motion, the typical @Home user charge is $46.00, of which @Home only sees $16 - the cable company keeps the other $30.

Re:This really doesn't make sense.

[IntlHarvester]

Certainly they are not taking in the entire $39.95 each month. The local provider (Cox Cable in my town) obviously takes a portion of that montly bill, but Excite! must still be receiving a ton of money each month.

Nah - they only get about $15 of that $40. The rest stays with the cable company (who is greedly eyeing that $15 for themselves, or selling your ass to Microsoft or AOL for some change).

Furthermore, they have to take all of the customer service calls, which is why they are screwed. They never thought there would be so many slashdotters rubbing their minimum wage idiots' noses into the existence of their NetBSD on Mac IIcx Firewalls. Of course, they wouldn't have had such support costs if their network was better run (but again that's probably because they were undercapitalized by the cable companies who created them, umm, not to mention their dotcrap buying spree).

Those of you who are being cut off will be lucky if you pick up 'just a pipe' service. This could be the big Interactive TV Convergance shakedown that the cablecos have wanted from day 1.

Facts for Cox users

[BCTECH]

I just got off the phone with an administrator at Cox. I had to weasel it out of him but my suspicions where correct. The only thing that they are threatening to turn off is Email, DNS, and web services. Does not affect me as I don't use their DNS and provide my own services via my collocated server. They just want enough customers to scream to force the cable companies such as Cox to pay Excite@home more money on contract renewals. I am not worried.

Slashdot shouldn't sensationalize headlines

[Antonioz]

The article says they have the right to shutdown, not that they will be shutting down. There's a big difference in my book.

Re:As seen on Excite

[tzanger]

The rest of the money is probably spent on their internal data lines connecting POPs, devaluation of hardware, facilities costs, insurance, support /administrative /billing /sales staff wages and benefits, etc. It could add up to quite a bit.

Devaluation of equipment? Are you serious?

I do the network admin / deployment at a small (1600 user) ISP. We run around like crazy looking for "ancient" AS5200s because they just plain work. We get 47 lines out of each one (bastards made us use PRIs instead of DEAs so now we "retaliated" by asking for NFAS) and once configured, they just work.

I can't imagine cable being much different: You have your super-expensive head-end for each trunk, and once it is configured, you leave it be. Keep some parts around or, if you've got the cash, a hot spare and your equipment doesn't change. It doesn't devaluate in the sense that it wears out. Your bandwidth costs will be through the roof, yes, but that's what the economy of volume does for you. You have a 30MBit pipe for each trunk, a killer web cache and maybe 155MBit upstream. (I'm guessing here: Bell Canada's HSE (DSL) internet bandwidth overcommit rates being > 100:1, cable's can't be that far off)

The point is that yes the equipment is expensive and the bandwidth is expensive. But the equipment doesn't wear out. I'm sure you can get some pretty sweet deals on bandwidth when you tell your provider that you want enough feeds to service a nation. It had to have been mismanaged. This kind of story isn't new; this particular one just happens to have hit a hell of a lot of people at once.

Not necessarily...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Even from this you can see what the problem was. ...
Capacity for 5 million, while servicing only 10% of that is not a good business plan.

Not necessarily.

Suppose (hypothetically):

Your network will support 5,000,000 subscribers,

Your non-recurring costs are $1/subscriber-month,

Your per-subscriber costs are $10/subscriber-month, and

You charge $50/subscriber-month.

This:

Breaks even at 125,000 subscribers,

Makes $195,000,000/month ($2.3 Billion/yr) at 5,000,000 subscribers, and

Breaks down at 5,000,001 subscribers.

Of course that's not what they did. Nevertheless, they were up to 73.4% of the design capacity of the network by 7/11. So (unless their business model didn't include making a profit until their capacity was saturated) I don't think lack of customers was the problem.

With no data but that timeline I'd wonder if they underestimated their per-user recurring costs (such as support) or their network capacity (which maps back into per-user recurring costs through extra support when they saturate and the connections start to degrade).

Oops. Wrong buzzword.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

When I said "non-recurring costs" I meant "recurring fixed overhead" (i.e. recurring costs that are not per-user).

Sorry 'bout that.

Bondholders Get First Dibs On The Money

[jake-in-a-box]

That's why they are willing to give up voting rights. Companies issue bonds when they don't want to dilute the stockholder's equity (and dividend checks).

Actually, secured creditors get theirs before the bondholders, but they may be secured by relatively worthless assets, like routers, switches and servers which devalue quickly. Bondholders are second class, as "unsecured creditors," anyone who holds accounts recievables on the bankrupt company is also lumped into this group.

Stockholders (steerage passengers in this metaphor) get stock, which they can sell for whatever they can get. Last I heard, excite@home was a penny stock...

Re:As seen on Excite

[Rasta Prefect]

Regardless of whether the equipment actually wears out, Accounting principles dictate that it must be assigned a life span and depreciated. This book value of initial cost - depreciation is for accounting purposes the value of the equipment and the depreciation has to going into the loss. Resale value is irrelevant unless you're actually selling it.

Nope

[JohnnyBolla]

You lose your IP address for one. Most of the IP's were rented by @home. In many cases you also lose your bandwidth beyond the gateway, @home leased the circuits. That's no the same for all markets, hope it works out for you.

Is it just me?

[RaginPagan]

There's something funky going on. I wonder if any other ATT@Home subscribers are seeing it. AT&T mailed out both e-mail and snail mail stating that to get updates on this situation we should go to http://help.broadband.att.com. When I try to get to that page normally I get nothing. No page. When I do a ping to that address it resolves (via Excite's DNS controllers) to 209.19.5.9 (further identified as gilera.tci.net). I eventually got to the page via a few round-about methods other users aren't likely to use. The actual address for the page, given by AT&T off their main site, is http://198.178.8.101. Now, maybe it's just a bad entry in @Home's DNS controller, but isn't it funny how the page that most ATT@Home users are going to want to get to at this time is being misdirected? Especially since the same DNS controller correctly resolves broadband.att.com as 198.178.8.166? Deliberate sabotage or just gross negligence on the part of their network admin? I don't know how this might be working in other parts of the country. It could be a locally assigned DNS controller, but @Home doesn't want to give you a choice in the matter of what controllers you use. They are assigned via DHCP, or are supposed to be.

Re:So... offline yet?

[LiENUS]

just a note to everyone... the time is in PST not EST or CST
for EST its 3:00 am for CST its 2:00 am.

About 1:30 EST @home DNS stopped responding for me

[Hoser McMoose]

Well, it looks to me like they're gone. I'm a Rogers@home customer, and was just on-line a few minutes ago when all DNS querries started failing for me. Trying to ping the @home DNS servers that I had been using and didn't get any response. I don't know if they're truly off, or just that they've blocked off the Rogers@home people or what.

On the upside, Roger's own new stuff seems to be working. Just checked my DNS entries on the Linux ip-masq box and it seems to have picked up brand new DNS severs to use. After a quick change to my workstation settings I was back up and running.... err, at least walking at a brisk pace. It looks like this change over was rather last-minute for Rogers, and some of their servers are still a touch sketchy. E-mail is working fine (though I only send through their servers, not receive), but usenet has been up and down for the past few days. A couple days ago I wasn't getting much at all, I believe due to DHCP server problems, but it seems to be working again.

Oh well, so far so good (knock on wood).

Went out here in Portland at 12

[indiigo]

@home Service just went out at 12:00 PST. I released my IP, renewed, and I'm now on AT&T's network.
dns resolves to attbi.com

Entirely different subnets. (obviously)

Took about 50 minutes

Some sites don't load. Or is the shack just down right now? :)

Seems quick, but probably because people haven't released and renewed yet in my neighborhood.

AT&T and Static IPs

[Wanker]

AT&T's support lines are swamped, even though it's the middle of the night. I managed to get through on chat much more quickly than the support number. (Though the person I spoke with on the phone was much friendlier than the one in chat...)

Here's what I found out:
+ The chat person said flat-out that AT&T does not support static IPs and that I was basically hosed. She referred me to the Win32 "configurator" executable on the http://newuser.attbi.com website. I didn't bother asking for a linux version. ;-)
+ The phone person said that since everything was so new that they didn't have their act together for static IPs yet and to run dynamic for a couple weeks until things settle down.

Either way, I'm stuck on DHCP for a while, but the phone support seemed to imply there was some light at the end of the tunnel once the initial rush of problems are sorted out. For me, this is only an issue for remote access since my internal network is all NATted anyhow.

My guess is that the Excite --> AT&T transition would be completely transparent to those on DHCP who renew their leases after midnight.

And of course, if they try to force me to stay on DHCP, there's always DSL...

Comcast Online Customer Information Hotline update

[spoonyfork]

As of 01-DEC-2001 10:00 AM EST according to the message at the Comcast Online Customer Information Hotline [phone], they are currently unaware of any interuptions in service. They advise that should your service become interupted, call the Customer Service Hotline at 1-888-793-0800.

I am a Comcast@home subscriber in the Metro Detroit area and had unresponsive DNS this morning but they're responding now.

Re:Excite was drain, not @Home

[daviddennis]

Bonds are also investments, but are very different from stocks.

Bonds are an obligation to pay. They are like a credit card with a very high credit limit. If you got a credit card and bought a spiffy Apple Cinema Display with it, you have to pay the money back, but the people who loaned you the money aren't going to get more money if the Cinema Display doubles your productivity.

If you can't pay back the debt, you either renegotiate it - just like a credit card - or go into bankruptcy. If you go into bankruptcy, you probably have to give up your spiffy Cinema Display.

If you issued the bonds to make investments like Blue Mountain Arts, worth nearly a billion at the height of the boom, and then sell it for $30 million, the bond holders (credit card company) get nothing.

But if the business you've built up has value, as Excite@Home does, you can sell the business and pay back the bonds.

The heart of this issue is that AT&T is trying to buy Excite@Home for a bit under 50c on the dollar. Understandably, the bondholders want to sell it for more like 90c so they can get most of their money back. So they are insisting on shutting down the network, because then they will no longer be losing $6 million a month, and they want to convince AT&T to pay more for the assets.

Of course if they actually do shut down, Excite@Home is worth LESS, not more, and AT&T will probably wind up paying LESS for the assets, if it even wants them anymore.

In short, the bondholders' gambit looks like it's failing, and they will wind up getting about 10c on the dollar instead of 50c.

Hope this has been informative.

D