Cox and Comcast may drop @Home in favor of another cablemodem provider

[Vincent]

This shouldn't affect users, however:



<< Cox and Comcast declined to comment on what company they may use in place of At Home. Both companies and AT&T say they will provide uninterrupted Internet service to their cable customers. >>



Here's a link to the NYT article (from Bloomberg):

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/01/technology/01WEB.html

 

[Siva]

Either its @home, or its comcast, one of them sucks because my cable sucks sh*t

 

[Rendus]

It's not a may, it's a WILL drop @Home (unless @Home somehow manages to convince them otherwise, which from the looks of things isn't going to happen).

It WILL cause problems for the end user, in several ways:

1) Say bye-bye to your @home.com e-mail addresses and webspace.
2) New provisioning systems will be put in place (already happening with Cox)
3) There's going to have to be some downtime to transition, I'd imagine.
4) @Home's bound to not be very friendly to customers from those companies (Tier 2 support, the network in general, etc).
5) Since it's each MSO doing their own thing, prices MAY go up again (I don't see this happening though).

But then, there may be some upsides as well, such as (possibly) different service levels (I know plenty of people who'd kill for 512/512kbit cable), possibly static IPs, allowances for servers, etc. It's up to the cable company at that point, unless they get in bed with someone else (like AOL, Earthlink, etc)

 

[SerraYX]

IMHO it's only because AT&T wouldn't sell its broadband market to Comcast, although for good reasons.

1. I don't even use the ones I have, remind me of having an AOL addy
2. It's not that major
3. It's happened before with no downtime plenty of times
4. I could care less, Comcast wants tech support done through them, not @Home
5. I don't see why they should. They're making plenty of money as it is, you don't really think it costs anywhere near $30-$40 to provide you with that cable service, do you? They may not be making a lot on that introductory $10 a month they charge you, but anything above that is like a gigantic layer of icing to them

Within a year to a couple years, cable will be useless anyway. It'll be better than 56K (28K in places not near the CO), but it'll be shared so badly by people that just want to Instant Message or check their email faster. Talk to a place that has had cable for some time, they will say that it has grown considerably slower. My father (Verizon Engineer) and I had a nice talk with a Comcast engineer, saying that Comcast has quite a thing going right now, milking everyone for premium access and premium prices for a year or two, but they're still worrying about after that, when DSL will have the upper hand.

 

[spanky]

<< Either its @home, or its comcast, one of them sucks because my cable sucks sh*t >>



i agree. i hope they won't cap our uploads to hell like they are doing now.

 

[Redwingsguy]

no one on my node seems tobe able to access our @home email in the past 6months....

 

[Balt]

Hmmm, I was seriously considering signing up for Comcast@Home. Now I don't know if that's such a good idea or what.

 

[Rendus]

Well, you're not the majority of the @Home populace. We get more flack when e-mail is down for Phoenix than when access is completely out for all of Phoenix.

1) MANY people use it, rely on it, and expect it to work.
2) It's VERY major. An entirely new way to address the modems, bill customers, and troubleshoot connections. It may not be major to the customer, but it's major to tech support, and in the end affects anyone who's calling in for help because the info they have is now out of date.
3) I have no evidence of this, but I think the transition is going on now, and it IS causing issues. We'll see one node down, then the one next to it, then the one next to IT, and so on. And we, of course, get calls on it. They're doing it now, so when the transition takes place, customers THINK it's seamless, and not related to that outage 3 days|weeks|months ago.
4) So does Cox. But for now, that's not an option. We will still have to deal with @Home, because we're still using @Home's network and services.
5) Let's be very generous and say they can oversell 3.0mbit to 100 customers. $50/month*100=$5000. How much does 2 T1 circuits+access cost? Cutting it close. The reason @Home gets away with it is due to sheer quantity of bandwidth, all located in a couple of main locations. And increased support cost due to #4 won't help any. -Shrug- Like I said, I don't see them raising prices either, but it COULD happen (Cox does fine in Las Vegas, a non-@Home city, at $34.95/month for 1.5/128, and they've done fine for the last 5 or 6 years).

Rendus, who is, of course, not speaking for his employer

 

[Schlocemus]

Interesting...

After many troubling days my Comcast@Home is finally working Yay!

Now, I'm not so sure what to expect.

 

[isekii]

hehe thank the lord I have Time Warner Road Runner

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

Keep your cable. Things will be fine.


FFMCobalt, who is, of course, not speaking for his employer ( )