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The Internet

Most @Home Customers Still Connected -- For Now 336

Posted by timothy from the unless-you're-with-at&t dept.
Mansing writes: "There may be hope after all, according to this update from the Washington Post" In short, a reprieve for many @Home customers, with negotiations ongoing between @Home and the major cable companies with which its service is offered -- watch for updates here. (AT&T broadband customers, though, will be moving to another service -- AT&T dropped out of the negotiations to keep @Home for their customers, and say that switching current customers to a new network will take about 2 weeks.)
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Most @Home Customers Still Connected -- For Now More

Most @Home Customers Still Connected -- For Now

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  • AT&T (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ailuro ( 174135 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @08:59AM (#2647315)
    As a AT&T @Home subscriber, I thought it was pretty funny last night when they showed a commercial for AT&T broadband bashing DSL for having no guarantees of connectivity. Ha! I hope that'll show up on adcritic.com soon, I wanna send that to my friends.

    Thank goodness for Work T-1 :)
    • What are you talking about? I have AT&T Broadband and I never lost connectivity.. And did it say that during those two weeks it would be down? I know some places lost it, but I'm sure they'll get it back soon. The reliability is still MUCH better then all of the people I know with DSL.

      • You're one of the lucky ones then. My connection has gone out several times in the past few months. They redid the DHCP server which caused everyone to lose their leases and not be able to get an IP.. also there have been tons of problems with the mail and news servers. I'm in an old Mediaone area by the way.
    • Two weeks my arse! I spent 3 hours offline. Now, I'm back up and cruising around. I was one of the lucky few in Wasthington/Oregon who got connected to AT&T Broadband almost immediately. Is it just me, or is the news server only serving up at 150K? I used to get 400K.
      :(
      Need less pr0n
      • 3 hours- that's nice. But my modem is still sitting there without synch, and I spoke to at least three other users in the area (Fremont CA) yesterday in the same boat. We're all dead in the water. I'm loosing an email address that I've had for nearly 5 years! I'm pissed about that (though I truly won't miss the spam..) I think that the whole thing sucks.
    • I found it ironic that my father-in-law, who keeps bashing me and my dialup connection lost service. He always used to brag about how he can click on a link and it loads instantly. Of course I was obliged to ask him 'How fast is your page loading now?'

  • That's nice to hear. (Score:4, Informative)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @08:59AM (#2647316) Journal
    I'm with Comcast, in Reston VA, and I did not want to go back to dial up. Comcast has been great. Always high speed, and I've never had any downtime. I downloaded RedHat 7.2 from linuxberg in < 1 hour over Thanksgiving weekend. (I'm not sure exactly how long it took, started download, got lunch, after lunch it was done). And they are fairly linux friendly. They don't "officialy" support it, but they use basic DHCP, so it's easy to connect. Just remember the "-h HOSTNAME" switch.
    • I'm with Comcast in Reston too and I've been noticing a fair number of what appear to be router resets on my cable modem (the cable modem is fine, but no traffic makes it in or out and all of my existing connections time out). I'm offline for about 5 minutes on each hit which is enough to time out my newgroup connections.

      On the other hand, I've had no major problems with Comcast for over a year now, which is pretty good for a broadband provider.

      I echo your sentiment about dialup though. I'm surprised you managed to get RedHat so quick though. Even though my pipe is nice and fat, it seems like most of RedHat's mirror sites are on dialup (if they aren't 5 versions out of date or just plain dead)

  • I guess Excite lives up to its name... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dafoomie ( 521507 ) <dafoomie@@@hotmail...com> on Monday December 03, 2001 @09:00AM (#2647318) Homepage
    Get Excited@home with the drama of if you'll actually get the service you paid for or not. My local Circuit City is still trying to sell people @home...
    • >Circuit City is still trying to sell people @home

      Saw a tv spot last night for AT&T @Home! Sheesh, wanted to to call the 800 number just to hear what they would say. This was seen on a cable channel (I have AT&T) and I have to wonder how long it takes to go and pull all these ads. Sure pissed me off (I lost @home Saturday morning, we're supposed to be hooked up to attbi today in Chicago).
  • I was with ATT and now I have no connection. See if I'll ever sign up with @Home again. Alot of people are blaming ATT for being the asshole, and causing @Home to go bankrupt.

    I'm not very happy with either company, but I have to say I think @Home is the real asshole. ATT may have been providing the acutal wiring to the house, and the installation, etc - but I considered myself an @Home customer. Now I just got ditched by them. Ditching a large percentage of your customers, what kind of recovery plan is that? Do the ever think I'll go back to them,now that I've seen their customer loyalty?

    Blah
  • My internet connection (AT&T@Home Dallas) died on Saturday morning, but it appears that the system is back up and running now, albeit still somewhat shaky. I'm actually fairly surprised at the speed with which AT&T responded to this.

    • My connection with AT&T in Seattle was back up as of Sunday morning. It's not @Home anymore, though - they changed us to a new network (.attbi.com - AT&T Broadband Internet.)

      After the first six hours of slow connectivity, with everyone all trying to get e-mail at once, it actually seems faster than the @Home access.
  • I've been in the dark as far as Internet access goes since Saturday. My cable modem continually flashes one single light - Power - indicating that it is indeed trying to sync up with something, if anything. AT&T has announced that all of their customers should be online within the next two to ten days, and that for every day I lose internet service, they'll credit me with two days.

    In the meantime, I've been experiencing symptoms of Internet withdrawal. Like a drug addict, I've been having fits of convultion when I realize that I can't brush up on my Counter-Strike skillz. We do have a dial-up connection back at home, but it started to refuse to authenticate my username and pass sometime around May, so I've been spending the entire weekend offline. At least with a drug IV you can _feel_ the pain of the needle prick.
    • I'm in the Atlanta Metro area, and I've been up and down since Saturday. Saturday, I would be online for an hour or so, but quite slow. Then down for a few hours. Back up for an hour or two, then down again. Yesterday, (all day) was down. When I got up for work this morning, I saw the cable modem was attached to the network. Not sure if it'll stay that way though. I called them last night, and they said that it'll take between one and fourteen days to get everything back. Sure. We'll see. I've already re-installed my old dial-up modem.

      --Xan

  • Cable ISP Bankruptcy and Story Posting Times (Score:4, Insightful)

    by user32.ExitWindowsEx ( 250475 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @09:06AM (#2647349)
    I have 2 things to say.
    First, now that it appears that each cable company will take the responsibility for providing high speed internet over its backbone, perhaps cable internet will grow faster because the ISP side will hopefully have much less of a bankruptcy fear with the TV side helping fund them.
    Second, and slightly off topic, someone needs to check Slashdot's clock. It's still stuck in Eastern Daylight Time, not Eastern Standard Time. Seeing stories with a time an hour ahead is kinda confusing, considering that the same times were accurate in early October.
  • I'm a Comcast user in Kansas City, KS (suburb of Olathe) and am still on, for now. They actually have this page http://www.comcastonline.com/info.htm where they (seriously) link to their 'backup plan'.
    That plan is a 10 hr/mo netzero account! If it wasn't so painfully close to me it would be the funniest thing I ever heard.

    I'm one of those brave souls that has _no_ copper into the home, sick to death of the local LEC (SWBell) I refuse to pay one dime to them. So if @home/Comcast go dark, I lose bandwidth for the first time in nearly 7 years.

  • I have had my cable connection over 4 years and have had few problems. Most interesting was when recently my IP changed from a 24.x to a 66.x, I was unable to get an IP with RedHat6.2 for several days. This mysteriously resolved itself.

    As of Monday morning my connection is still normal and active.
  • I never even got a fricken email. I just woke up Saturday morning and NOTHING! That day I went out shopping for DirecTV + DSL (static IP, domain hosting, 1.5Mbps). Soon I'll be off the AT&T tit completely.
    • Ummm.... Most of the DSL service in the US is powered by Covad. AT&T is planning on buying covad if they offically plan to close their doors, so you may end up back on that tit, but you will not know it.
      • For DirecTV, it depends on where you are. For example, in the Ameritech region, you're using Ameritech for the line service (*spit*) and DirecTV for the ISP. I think :) Anyway, you get your static IP, but you're stuck at 768/128, which kinda sucks, especially since when it was using Rhythms, it was at 768/768 :(
        • When I say powered, I mean the actual equipment at the phone company CO. The local loop is with your Incumbent LEC, the ip is powered by your isp, but what Covad owns is the equipment that does the encoding and the singnal on the loop. Beoynd that, in most cases with SDSL, its frame relay. ADSL is simular in setup, but its more a ethernet bridge than what SDSL is.
    • Hrm. With the fact that a mass mailing went out for this potentially happening both via snail-mail and email I have to assume you mean no mail sat morning.

      I too failed to receive anything saturday morning, but considering that it wasn't AT&T's idea, it's doubtfull they even had a chance. I don't think it's really something you can blame on AT&T.

      • I'm looking in my excite @home mailbox right now, and the only thing in it is a message describing the "wonderful new services to which I'm now entitled as a member of the excite@home community." What a load of horseshit.

    • Is DirecTV's DSL like Dishnetwork's satellite connection? I have a friend who uses this and with the 800ms to 1000ms ping times, telnet and IRC is almost impossible. His dialup connection seems much more responsive then the satellite, although the Dishetwork's throughput is near 1Mbps... Perhaps his dish is not properly configured, but I'd imagine this is normal considering the distance and method his packets have to travel.
      • Yeah, thats normal response time. I had an office I had to support in Richmond that got one of those setups. It was impossible to get ipsec to work over that thing.

        I would have advised some better network connection, but they liked the speed. I wish I knew of the problems that it had before I gave the ok to let them install it. I only found out the problems from experence (running vnc would somehow cause the sync to go out on the link....), and I found out one of my friends from irc beta tested the two way satellite internet setup for whatever that company was that went down the tubes a while back. He said that it just plainly SUCKED.
      • No. AFAIK DirecTV's DSL service is *normal* over-your-phone-lines DSL.

  • AT7T? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 )
    AT&T broadband customers, though, will be moving to another service -- AT7T dropped out of the negotiations to keep @Home for their customers

    Wow, do you guys even glance at the story before you post these days?

    Anyway. I always knew these giant corporations would settle their diffrences and come through for the little guy in the end. Wait. No I didn't, this is a complete shock!

  • Re-connect how-to (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mark Bainter ( 2222 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @09:16AM (#2647392)
    I posted this in reply to the how-to in the other thread, but seems I might be better served to post it here or many people might not see it.

    FWICT, the best way to get your service re-established goes like this:

    -kill your dhcp client. Wipe your leases.
    -re-init your cable modem:
    (Unplug it, wait 20-30 seconds and plug it in)
    -Wait for it to sync up. If it doesn't, keep trying.
    -Once it resyncs, run:
    tcpdump -i eth0 -lf dst port 68
    This should list the dhcp replies going out
    on your subnet. If you don't see them,
    something is still not right. Try re-initing
    your cable modem again.
    -Start your dhcpclient

    This should get you setup. Remember, if you're like me and were on a static number and blocking dhcp traffic you'll need to alter your firewall rule(s).

    • Re:Re-connect how-to (Score:3, Informative)

      by pongo000 ( 97357 )
      If you have one of the General Instrument SBxxxx series of cable modems, you can connect directly to the box with http://192.168.100.1 and see exactly what is going on with the cable synchronization. Even though all the lights were on and steady, I discovered the box was still trying to negotiate an address.
  • how the cable companies can still be selling the @Home service to people. A family friend just had the service installed this past Saturday. We still have service through Cox@Home right now, but talk about an under-handed business practice. They should at least put a temporary hold on new installations. I do see thier point though. You still do installations, blame @Home for any problems, but at the same time lock these people into Cable broadband rather than see them go to DSL. Even if this all means temporarily not being able to bill subscribers for service, just the installs.
  • I am an AT&T cable modem customer and have had the bad fortune of being transferred from @Home to AT&T's own ISP.

    They suck massively.
    1) Their support are not answering the phone
    2) My IP address that has been static since I signed up over a year ago has suddenly changed and it appears that static addressing in any form has gone up in smoke. This screws anyone relying on a static IP.
    3) They have been playing fast and loose with the service agreement (that I signed), but instituting an AUP (that I didn't sign)that directly contradicts it.
    4) Their DNS service has been very erratic

    This is not the sort of crap I want to be paying for and I am actively shopping for a replacement (I.E. DSL). I expect any other user who wants to do more than play with the latest microsoft browser will be doing the same and dumping AT&T as soon as possible.
    • The support line is down. (The one at 888-262-6300) but they setup a new one immediately on the morning it happened at 1-866-706-8818. It goes directly to support, no menus.

      It seems static addressing has gone away to me as well. And I'm disappointed. But considering that ti's an always on service I would be surprised if your ip changed very often. And I expect they'll probably offer static's again once things get settled down. Trying to co-ordinate the assignment of ip addresses while bringing everyone online would be rather difficult.

      I have to agree that their service agreement/AUP really sucks. And their changes really irritate me as well. So we're on the same page there. I can't really comment on the dns servers though, as I run my own.

    • Re:AT&T's replacement is worse than bad. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by digitalunity ( 19107 ) <digitalunity @ y a h oo.com> on Monday December 03, 2001 @09:41AM (#2647505) Homepage
      1) Their support are not answering the phone
      Be kind, they're very busy right now. Wait a little.

      2) My IP address that has been static since I signed up over a year ago has suddenly changed and it appears that static addressing in any form has gone up in smoke. This screws anyone relying on a static IP.
      Wait a while. Things will settle down. My IP address has changed many times since saturday morning. If you need a static IP to run something against the AUP, maybe you need a new ISP anyways.
      3) They have been playing fast and loose with the service agreement (that I signed), but instituting an AUP (that I didn't sign)that directly contradicts it.
      I haven't seen anything like this. Do you have any references?
      4) Their DNS service has been very erratic

      It was. It's working now. I couldn't get any of the DHCP assigned DNS IP's to work. Now they do. I think they updated the DHCP well before actually turning on the DNS servers. Oh well. Get over it. If you want DSL; you can go ahead and do it. I however, as well as everyone else I know, has found the short service interupption more than acceptable.
      This is not the sort of crap I want to be paying for and I am actively shopping for a replacement (I.E. DSL). I expect any other user who wants to do more than play with the latest microsoft browser will be doing the same and dumping AT&T as soon as possible
      What the fsck are you talking about? You think maybe throwing in some mention of Microsoft will get you modded up or make you look cool? What do you need to do thats so goddamned important that you need a static IP? And what in the freak does a browser have to do with your ISP? That's not rhetorical.

      So, yes they made some big changes. No, that's not fully exculpatory for the service interuptions. However, they've declared that it will be taken care of.

      Come to think of it... there was a new AUP a while back that you had to opt-out of in writing. It's been in effect for quite a while. Maybe you should check your mail. :)

      Moderators: If you have to look up any of the terms I've used, don't moderate me. You're probably confused. Read the Moderator Guidlines [slashdot.org] before doing anything drastic.
      • What do you need to do thats so goddamned important that you need a static IP? And what in the freak does a browser have to do with your ISP? That's not rhetorical.

        I can't speak for the poster above, but the reason I got always-on internet service was so that I could shell into my home computer and access my files from wherever I like, not to mention forwarding X applications over the Internet when useful/necessary. Static ip is necessary for that.

        Lighten up on the attitude a little, k buddy?
        • I've been stuck with a dynamic IP on comcast@home for a while now, but easy external access is possible, even if you're using a router for NAT on your internal network. Get a hostname from somebody like dyndns.org(myhostname.dyndns.org) and point it to whatever your IP is today. Then get a client to monitor your IP and notify dyndns.org when your IP changes. They have a nice interface set up for poor dynamic ip folks like us to programatically update our address. Set it up to run frequently with cron. I use ipcheck (ipcheck.sourceforge.net) with a Linksys router and it has been working flawlessly for nearly 8 months now. When you want to get to your box, you just use your hostname instead of your IP, or if your app really really needs an IP, just do an nslookup on your hostname.

      • 3) They have been playing fast and loose with the service agreement (that I signed), but instituting an AUP (that I didn't sign)that directly contradicts it.
        I haven't seen anything like this. Do you have any references?

        This is true. I have two signed agreements: One with AT&T, one with @home. The AT&T agreement does not specifically exclude running servers on the service. In fact, AT&T goes so far as to tell you that you are responsible for any security issues as a result of running servers on the service. Now that @home is out of the picture, I can only assume my (signed) agreement with @home is null and void.


        On another note, if you go to the help.broadband.att.com website, one of the questions prominently displayed is "Can I run a server on the network?" It appears AT&T is simply parroting what was in the original @home agreement. So in the regard, I believe the original author is correct: AT&T is playing fast and loose with the AUP.


        I've also noticed AT&T doesn't appear to be scanning any ports (@home was keen on scanning port 119 about once an hour). It will be interesting to see what the new "official" AUP says about servers...

    • 1 has already been addressed so we go to:
      2) My IP address that has been static since I signed up over a year ago has suddenly changed and it appears that static addressing in any form has gone up in smoke. This screws anyone relying on a static IP.

      @Home used dynamic IPs, but the thing was that they never really were dynamic. In two years my IP never changed. Now, I'm not sure what's up. It looks like AT&T is, in effect, now treating broadband like the "entertainment service" it always claimed it was whenever you bitched to their support people -- truly dynamic IPs to make it tougher to run a full-time server, 1.5M cap to limit file sharing. Maybe they also got a clue and will be policing their users better and flush out some of the script kiddies.
      If you want static IP, then get DSL.

      3) They have been playing fast and loose with the service agreement (that I signed), but instituting an AUP (that I didn't sign)that directly contradicts it.

      They changed the AUP a few months ago; you should have gotten a notice of it. You had a chance to opt out (although it required either a letter to corporate or cancelling). Heck, you're on a new system; demand them to send you the new AUP. Start getting pro-active here.

      4) Their DNS service has been very erratic

      The network's been up since Saturday morning! Considering that they only had about 60 days to deploy the new provider to 860,000 computers, some DNS goofiness isn't out of the question. This is like expecting someone's last-second hacked together code is not going to have bugs. Get real.

      I'm still reserving judgement. I was very dissatisfied with @Home's service, but since I live in a DSL-less area, I had only one choice for broadband (in '99). Satellite waits in the wings, but I'll let attbi settle out before I make my choice. I was back up and running in about 30 hours -- still shorter than two outages under the previous regime.

      Two lessons to take away:
      1. This wouldn't have been near as bad if broadband providers had been forced to open their systems to multiple ISPs. AT&T paid dearly for being married to @Home.
      2. We need to get the Internet stable enough that we can start getting people to treat it like a true "utility" rather than an "entertainment service." Right now, things are still way too wide open. Consumer protection and basic regulation would have prevented this weekend's fiasco from happening. We need to treat the backbone like a communications network, the ISPs like utilities. I'm OK with free and open so long as we have rules (give 30 days notice to system shutdown, provide e-mail forwarding, in a case where you are a true monopoly you can't shut down unless you find a new provider).
      I think it's also time for the companies to wake up and realize that unless the government steps in and writes a big honking check for a network upgrade, half this country will be on dialup for 10-15 more years. And I don't see Dubya (or anyone else for that matter) opening up his checkbook. Broadband isn't dead, but it will need to look long and hard at how it chooses to move forward.
  • ...but ever since they shut down AT&T my Comcast speeds have been incredible.

    While my heart goes out to the stranded AT&T folk, I really gotta love the SPEED!!!
  • I was wondering why @Home is going bankrupt, when they have such a large revenue.

    The only thing I can think of is that they did too much, too fast. In trying to corner the market, they must have introduced amazing amounts of waste and inefficiency.

    I'm still connected in Lafayette, IN, but others (with ATT) aren't. First time in my life I'm glad I have Insight cable...
  • After going through a "reconfiguration" of my AT&T Broadband settings (via one of their automated pages, during the brief hour or so I actually *WAS* online) -- it made my browser home page http://home.attbroadband.com. Seems to re-direct to Yahoo's front page. So, I've gone from Excite to Yahoo, via AT&T? Hrm...

    --Xan

  • Trouble in the transition: One user's experience. (Score:4, Informative)

    by McNally ( 105243 ) <mmcnally@@@gmail...com> on Monday December 03, 2001 @09:31AM (#2647461) Homepage
    I was an Excite@Home broadband subscriber in Washington state until around 6:00 AM local time on Saturday. (I was using the service at the time it cut out..) On Sunday morning I received an automated phone message from the local cable provider, AT&T, saying they were taking steps to provide a transition to their own service as quickly as possible. Sunday afternoon I received a second call claiming that they had re-established service in my area.

    The claim turned out to be semi-true. The first hurdle turned out to be DNS. The nameservers specified by their DHCP servers have been totally bogus. The first two in the list of three are unpingable and the third replies to every request with a lookup failure / unknown host. So I pointed my systems towards an open, known-good nameserver run by one of my former sysadmin colleagues. Now I've got correct nameservice but it turns out that about two out of three addresses I try are unpingable for reasons that are completely opaque to me. Example: I can ping two hosts (call them A & B) across the country, both sitting on the same subnet. Host A answers, host B is unreachable. Traceroute to host B (from my machine) travels all the way to the gateway that's the last hop before either host, but packets going one hop further to host B don't seem to make the round trip while packets to host A do. (I have, of course, verified through a third host that host B is actually up and reachable, just not reachable from my home.)

    Called the provided AT&T tech-support number on Sunday afternoon hoping to find a quick fix (or at least make them aware there was a problem..) The recorded phone message said they don't provide phone support after 8 pm or on Sunday (arggh!) but would be answering calls again at 8 am Monday. Suspecting that I'd have to deal with a bottom-level tech-support script drone trained to reject any request from someone (a) running an "unsupported configuration", and/or (b) refusing to run AT&T's little "Click OK and we'll do a bunch of stuff to your computer's configuration and then we'll all be happy" Windows Configurator utility, which their message insisted I download and run to fix all my problems, I unplugged my lovable little Linksys box, connected the PC directly to the cable modem, rebooted into Windows and ran their damn configurator. It's not like I actually expected it to fix anything, but the only effects I could observe were about 90 seconds (!) of hard-drive activity, a mandatory Windows reboot, and the fact that now all MSIE browser windows say "Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by AT&T Broadband Internet" in the title bar. God only knows what other crap they dumped into my registry, but I was planning a re-install this week anyway. Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)

    Anyway, that's a summary of my experience with the transition so far. I'll post a follow-up after things settle out if anyone expresses interest.

    • Called the provided AT&T tech-support number on Sunday afternoon hoping to find a quick fix (or at least make them aware there was a problem..) The recorded phone message said they don't provide phone support after 8 pm or on Sunday (arggh!) but would be answering calls again at 8 am Monday.

      I was able to reach AT&T level 2 help on the chat facility at http://www.broadband.att.com Sunday evening. Cool thing is that you can see exactly where in the queue you are, and it will count down until you're next in line. All that time spent, only to learn AT&T is being very adamant about not reissuing static IP addresses unless you have an "unsupported version of MacOS." So, does anybody know which versions of MacOS don't support DHCP?
      • MacOS 7.5.3 on a non-powerpc mac. I'm positive that you need OpenTransport for DHCP to work, and I think the oldest versions that OT worked with was like 7.5.5 or 7.6.

        I don't know if this is the newest version that won't work, but I know it won't work. AT&T might not support non-powerpc macs at all, so you might want to go to ftp://ftp.info.apple.com and get the OpenTransport standalone installer and see what it says its required system is.
    • and the fact that now all MSIE browser windows say "Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by AT&T Broadband Internet" in the title bar. God only knows what other crap they dumped into my registry, but I was planning a re-install this week anyway.
      I'm sure you already know how to fix that, but for those of you who experience IE title bar tamperings by AT&T or whomever (I experienced this while I used their dial-up service), it's just a simple registry hack.

      Here are instructions [microsoft.com] to fix it, or change it to whatever you want .

    • Still, it's not an encouraging sign when a company feels it's on solid customer-relations ground putting an advertisement in every window titlebar. (Besides, what's the freaking point? Am I supposed to buy more Internet connectivity? I'm already paying for their service, what more do they want?)

      You wouldn't believe the number of people that couldn't tell you who they got their Internet service from (or even what type of service - DSL? Cable? AOL?). Name recognition is what will keep your customer from switching to another service (I'd switch, but I am already with AT&T and I LIKE AT&T - they are a nice company). A nameless provider has to get by on actual technical merit, which of course would never work for AT&T.

      When they switched the service brand from Road Runner to @Home (great decision guys) they even provided a utility that would take the stupid bird out of RR's branded internet explorer.
    • I did, just to see what happened, and found out that instead of my previous 24.x.x.x address, I now had a 12.x.x.x address, and everything worked quite well, and the nameservers are responding as expected. Now that I know my new address, which has nothing to do with my old address, I could probably use it as a static address. I've already let Public DNS know of my new IP address; hopefully I won't have to change it anytime soon.

      Before that I was able to ping some machines but not others, just as you described, from my location here in Seattle.

      Unfortunately I don't know if there's any way to determine your new address without using DHCP. I doubt it, since indications from AT&T are that they aren't supporting static addresses.

  • msn? (Score:1)

    by bugi ( 8479 )
    Who wants to bet that the new service be msn?

    (other likely options being aol and earthlink)

    What service would be best for the subscribers?
  • I was a Charter@Home user for the past 2 years, quite pleased with my 1.5Mb/128k connection (not liking the 128k part too much) but since @Home/whoever shut off that network, I've been connected to what I think is Charter's Pipeline service at a whopping 128k/128k with 700ms response times to a CS server that was 68ms. Added to that, Charter is filtering ports 21, 23, 25, and 80 while leaving open the 139 port that @Home used to filter for MS File shares.

    After talking with the billing lady, my bandwidth is supposed to return to 1.5Mb/128k and the filtering "may" return to what @home had within the next few weeks after they convert all the charter@home users to charter pipeline. Unfortunatly, I'm only able to get IDSL where I live, so 128k/128k and a dream of more is still better than 128k/128k and no hope for improvement with DSL.
  • I have lost my connection and may not get it back since AT&T says they will migrate, among other cities, "...some Michigan markets..." Nice. It's already been covered by other posters, but this is AT&T's fault. They'd rather cut service to their customers and point fingers at @Home, than work WITH @home and come to an agreement. But imagine how happy I was when I read that the new AT&T service will be "compatible with America Online"!! Well, that's a relief! You can read more about it at AOL Keyword: BiteME AT&T 5ux0rz ~5wid3r
  • Mine was cut off at midnight Fri/Sat. Nothing but blinking lights on a useless modem now. I have to come to work to get my 'fix'.

  • Comcast Jumpstart - Comcast's @Home Replacement? (Score:5, Informative)

    by instinctdesign ( 534196 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @10:31AM (#2647745) Homepage
    I posted this in the last @Home discussion, but that was after about 450 posts so it basically got lost, so here it is again.

    I actually just had a chat with a Comcast rep at a local technology show and it looks like that if your running Comcast@Home you might be in for a significantly better ride than the other providers have partnered with.

    Comcast has been working on their own broadband cable network for a bit of time now, partly anticipating the demise of @Home as well as the issues rising out of the severe limitations that @Home put on commercial deals that Comcast wanted to pursue. Originally planned to launch in April 2002, the Comcast network, currently codenamed 'JumpStart', has been pushed forward to a potential launch January 1st 2002, assuming everything goes well. Due to the accelerated timetable there may be glitches in the initial rollout, but frankly intermittently buggy cable (assuming it will be fixed in the near future) is better than dialup in my opinion.

    You will however lose your @Home email account as well as any stored messages or address book so back them up as soon as possible. Comcast will provide email services once their network is up and running. What the final name of the program I can't attest to, jumpstart.net .org and .com all seem to be taken, so its hard to say what your email address could end up being.

    Obviously this is all from one source, though a Comcast representative, its best to avoid taking all this to heart until there is a final formal announcement as to their plans. I do know that Comcast@Home is up and running as of mid-day today. For how long... who is to say.

  • switch to dsl? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Nullsmack ( 189619 )
    If cable modem service goes out for my area, I fully intend on switching to DSL. www.dslreports.com shows a dsl connection in my area that is about the same speed as my cable. Of course, if I switch to dsl, then I'll probably get rid of my cable tv as well. I'm curious how many others will do something similar to this?
  • Don't suppose they pulled the end of the month as the date to shut down out of thin air.

    Since it would take a month to get another
    service provider I'll probably end up still with AT&T
    @ Home and paying for a month of downtime.

    Like handheld organizers, service providers are another thing we keep
    getting told we need to have yet are left on our own to figure out
    why. Service providers are supposed to store CD collections for us,
    record TV shows for us, buy groceries for us, connect us to the internet,
    yet the amount of
    downtime we're caused by centralizing everything
    makes me wish we had a good reason for buying them.
    • paying for a month of downtime.

      Theoretically, they're planning to credit us @ 2 for 1 for unconnected days. So if my acess comes back up today, they'll credit me for either 4 or 6 days depending on wether they think its a 3 day or 2 day downtime.

      I'm not holding my breath or anything, but that's what they're currently saying.

      Hopefully this will be more accurate than their emails saying that they didn't expect any problems with the transition.
  • AT&T is flexing their virtual monopoly muscle by not coming to some sort of interim agreement with @home to temporarily continue providing service to its customers. Every other cable provider was able to reach some sort of agreement with @home. The New York Times reports [nytimes.com] that there are 850k AT&T customers without service. It upsets me that AT&T has the audacity to put 850k of its customers out of service. Apparently, AT&T thinks it can afford to lose 850k customers.

    I live in AT&T's Chicago market and have been without service since Saturday morning. I got a message on my answering machine from AT&T that said I may be without service for about ten days. I have also heard estimates from other sources ranging from a week to a month. The Chicago Tribune has a related article [chicagotribune.com] about the 100k people affected in the Chicagoland area. Every person I know who has a cable modem is affected by this.

    I've already been through two DSL bankruptcies (PhoenixDSL and NorthPoint). But, AT&T is forcing me to reconsider DSL once again. I can't get the same maximum speed out of DSL because of my distance from the CO, but I'm fed up with AT&T's handling of the situation. They obviously don't care enough about retaining their customers to have come to some sort of agreement with @home, like every other cable company did, to continue providing service until they were really ready to cut-over users to their new network. Can you imagine if AT&T would have done this with their wireless phone service? Since there is actually healthy competition in place, I'm sure AT&T would have lost a lot of customers...

  • Back up already... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mr. Sharumpe ( 214678 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @11:42AM (#2648242) Homepage
    I had thought that AT&T made a good switch - I was only out of service for Saturday, and Sunday morning I received a recorded call that told me to "reboot my computer and launch my browser" and the AT&T Broadband Internet page would come up with instructions for the new service.

    Not being someone who keeps (or even installs) the standard software suite from the ISP, I set my network to use DHCP and kicked it - and got a new IP from the new DHCP server, and (once I realized I was still using the old DNS servers and reset them) everything has been fine.

    There are only two problems:
    1) the new service is limited to 1.5mbps (download) rather than 3mbps. This is supposedly "to ensure good quality of service for everyone."
    2) my static IP is no longer static, or at least the DHCP lease says it is only good for about 5 days. I don't run public servers, but I like to be able to ssh to my box and get files if I need them.

    Beyond these things, everything is back to working as normal. The added benefit is that, after using a modem for 24 hours, I appreciate having a high-bandwidth connection more than ever. :)

    Mr. Sharumpe
    • I had thought that AT&T made a good switch.

      Well duh, it only took you a day to get your service back on. For some people (like us peons in the Pittsburgh area) it could take closer to ten days. Why? Well, they can't do the whole thing all at once. It's gonna take time to get the whole network up. So while in areas like Washington, Chicago, and wherever else they are working on now, there's gonna be a higher-rate of people who think AT&T did a good job. But in other places, where there are more people pissed cause it's taking them a whole week to get their cable kickin again, you're gonna have a higher-percent of irate people and people who switch to DSL.

      And thats another thing, I don't get all these people saying "To heck with AT&T, I'm getting my baby-bell telco out here to get me DSL. Well guess what, it's peoplebably gonna take your Baby Bell (or whoever else does DSL in your area) alot longer to get to your house and install DSL than it will for AT&T to get your cable modem blinking again. If you're switching for "The principal of the matter", why? It isn't AT&T's fault @home went bankrupt cause they built too much network too fast.

      ~~Dan
    • Try this - instead of an A record for your home system (using the IP address) try adding a CNAME entry (using the fully qualified hostname that AT&T or whoever gives you). This is assuming that your ISP-provided computer name resolves (mine does). I did that on my computer at home & everything works ok.


      I have Comcast@Home in the DC area, no interruptions yet (knock wood). Guess they're afraid of cutting off any bigwigs that may be on @home :P.

    • It is quite possible that they put a somewhat short lease in the dhcp server so if you ever change to a dynamic ip (i assume you pay a premium for static), they can transition you over, without having to have you kick your dhcp client.

      Also, it is possible they didn't put you on a static yet, but most dhcp servers will accept dhcp lease renewals. My (rr.com) cablemodem at home does so, and I think the ip changed only 2 times since i started paying attention, and once was because it switched into a different subnet (66. instead of 24. :) The lease period was 24 hours last i checked

  • For those losing static IP's (Score:4, Informative)

    by BadBlood ( 134525 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @11:59AM (#2648356)
    Like me, someone who lost his static IP for a dynamic one, I'd like to recommend www.dns2go.com.

    The have a client (win32, linux, & more) that basically sends a heartbeat to their servers telling them your IP address. You can then setup a user defined domain within their top level .d2g.com to point to your dymamic IP, regardless of what it is. Pretty handy.

  • AT&T Are Lying Sacks of Shit (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rossz ( 67331 ) <[ogre] [at] [geekbiker.net]> on Monday December 03, 2001 @12:16PM (#2648453) Journal
    On Friday, after the judge ruled, I called AT&T Broadband and asked if my service would be affected. I was told no. Sometime early Saturday morning service stopped (I was asleep at the time).

    I'm switching to DSL (already ordered). It will take about the same amount of time to get it as AT&T says it will take to get my service back. I'm cancelling my AT&T service for the simple reason that they lied to me. Had they simply said, "there might be a problem," I would not be so pissed.

  • 2 weeks? who said? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jburkholder ( 28127 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @12:43PM (#2648664)
    >switching current customers to a new network will take about 2 weeks

    What is the source for this? AT&T has said 7 -10 days fairly consistently. Over 40% of customers are already on attbi. AT&T said they will have 600,000 subs moved over by the end of the day Monday, with the rest back up by Friday.

    according to reuters [yahoo.com]:

    ...it has already moved to its own high-speed Internet network nearly 40 percent of the 850,000 customers who lost service this weekend...

    About 330,000 subscribers in Oregon, Washington and the Dallas area have been moved to the new AT&T Broadband network, the company said in a statement. Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to be moved during the day on Monday, and by day's end it expects to have switched 657,000 subscribers to its network.

    The balance of its affected customers will be switched by Friday, it said


    and here, from an AT&T press release [att.com]:

    ENGLEWOOD, Colo. - AT&T Broadband moved about 330,000 cable Internet customers to its new high speed Internet network as of Monday morning, Dec. 3, less than 48 hours after the At Home Corporation shut off service for more than 850,000 AT&T customers. The At Home Corporation's action followed a decision in U. S. Bankruptcy Court to cancel cable company distribution agreements with At Home.

    The customers moved to the new AT&T network so far reside in Oregon, Washington, and metro Dallas. Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to be moved today and tomorrow, bringing the total added to the new network to about 657,000.

    There are lots of other details in the AT&T press release, including what will happen to customers still on the MediaOne network in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Atlanta; Jacksonville; Los Angeles; the Stockton and Fresno areas of Central California; New England; Richmond, Va.; and St. Paul, Minn.

    Customers formerly served by MediaOne are remaining on a separately operated network
    ...
    For the group of customers in the markets being served by this separately operated network, the service will be re-branded as AT&T Broadband Internet. For the majority of customers in these markets, the network, Internet service connectivity, email domain names, and data transmission speed won't be affected. The only change these customers will see is new content provided by Yahoo! To access this new content, customers can direct their browsers to http://home.attbroadband.com/.
    • Here in Atlanta, we were told "1 to 14 days". That sounds like two weeks to me!

      Via phone, and email (repeatidly)

      --Xan
    • (yall might want to mod this up.)

      ATT just posted their schedule for switching over people who are not switched yet. (e.g., your cable light is out- like for those of us in illinois).

      Here it is, not bad for the Illinois ones:

      Please review the following AT&T Broadband Internet migration schedule to find out when your high-speed cable Internet service will be available on the AT&T network.

      Customers in San Francisco and Illinois are scheduled to move this Monday and Tuesday
      Customers in Denver, Colorado and Salt Lake City, Utah are scheduled for Wednesday
      Customers in Hartford, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Sacramento, California and the Majority of the Rocky Mountain region are scheduled to move on Thursday
      Customers in Michigan will be moved on Friday
      You will be contacted by AT&T Broadband with further instructions when the transition of your high-speed cable Internet service is complete.

      We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this interruption may cause and thank you for your patience as we work to provide you with the best high-speed cable Internet service possible.
  • Here is the migration schedule by city for as of this morning. . .

    On Now - Oregon, Washington , Dallas
    Mon, Tues - San Francisco, Illinois
    Wednesday - Denver, Salt Lake
    Thursday - Hartford, Conn., Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and the Rocky Mountain region in the mountain West

    See the press release here [att.com]

  • AT&T vs. Excite@Home (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GB Kalis ( 534618 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @02:16PM (#2649421)
    This entire thing is being caused because AT&T wants to buy out @Home. Even though @home is reporting a net loss, most of the loss comes from the purchasing of equipment. Once cable internet service stops growing so rapidly, @Home will be able to start paying of all their debt because they'll be making money and not paying for so much new equipment. @Home is valued at billions of dollars, yet AT&T (who bought 23% of @Home for over a billion dollars) now wants to buy out @Home for a measly $375 million. AT&T saw that since @Home is reporting a lose (in equipment, as was already stated) they could try to force @Home into bankruptcy court and then buy the entire company for less than 10% of it's value. AT&T knows that the telephone infrastructure that they own is aging and needs to be upgraded. So, rather than upgrade what they own and pay billions of dollars, they see that @Home has already built a large part of the infrastructure and is reporting a net loss. If they can manage to buy it cheap, they don't have to spend as much money. If @Home fails, the only party that profits from it is AT&T. Do we really want Ma Bell in charge again? There was a reason the telephone industry was deregulated.

  • Updates Regarding Recent News About Excite@Home (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They have released a detailed description of who's up and down.. They've also said they will give two days for every one that the subscribers are down. Here's the release http://198.178.8.101/faq.jsp?content_id=1081&lobid =1

  • @home.com Email... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ironix ( 165274 )

    I remember some people were wondering how @Home could fail when they took in so much $$ from their customers...

    Well... Here's a hint. I closed my @Home account 1 year ago. I had 3 email addresses on that account.

    Guess what! I still use ALL 3 of those email addresses, and they all still work beautifully.

    Considering the amount of SPAM I get, and how much bandwidth costs, no wonder they are going out of business.
  • Does anyone know if @home billed for service ahead of or after the month of service provided? If ahead of then I paid for 30 days of service and only got 10 days. I plan on calling my credit card company and asking them to reverse the charge.

    I don't want to kick them while they're down but its bullshit that I paid for a service I am not getting, I am sure many others feel the same way. It's too bad there had to be a pissing contest with ATT.

  • AT&T moved me this morning (Score:3, Insightful)

    by koreth ( 409849 ) on Monday December 03, 2001 @02:56PM (#2649684)
    My cable had gone down Saturday morning, and I was prepared to spend a couple weeks suffering through dialup access. But I woke up Monday morning to find my cable modem back in business. I had to fire up a DHCP client to get a valid address. No more static IP address for now, it looks like; I think I'll give AT&T a couple weeks to finish moving everyone else over, then get in touch with them about a static address. Or maybe not. Once I realized my static address was gone, I went and signed up with DynDNS.org [dyndns.org] and changed my DNS records so that my home machine has a CNAME pointing to its name on dyndns.org rather than an A with its old static address. Then I downloaded a dynamic DNS client (lots available for Linux and Windows and others) and set it to send an update to dyndns.org's servers whenever my address changes. My assumption is that this will allow me to keep serving up my Web pages with no more than an occasional brief glitch if my IP address changes. And the lease times are pretty long (5 days), so even those glitches should be vanishingly rare, assuming they happen at all; I'm betting I'll be able to just keep renewing my initial address indefinitely. So the only real downside to being on AT&T's network is that my downloads appear to be capped at 1.5Mbps. Boo hoo, $50/month for T1-speed downloads, don't everyone offer me a hankie at once. Still a fantastic deal, even if it's not as sweet as it was a week ago. Way to go AT&T. One mostly-satisfied customer here. (No downtime would have been better, but I had longer outages than this on my old DSL line even without the provider going bankrupt, so it'd be churlish to complain.)

  • attbi transition (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Daspek ( 132130 )
    i was apparently the 68 or 69th person in the nation to make the transition to the attbi network from excite's (i'm in oregon). aside from the obvious question why we were the first to make the transition, i'm quite miffed at att's tech support. i understand that they were most likely busy, but no one with whom i spoke knew a damn thing about what was going on.

    overall, i'm neutral about the switch. i do like my new, lower ip, but i fear that it isn't going to be quite as static as my old one. either way, attbi looks "cleaner" than @home, imo.

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