at the temporal coordinates: 12/3/01 9:42 AM, the entity known as
SlashDevNull at slashdevnull_at_mac.com conveyed the following:
>
> Salutations,
>
> From what I understand there are a few major points to all of this:
>
***SNIP***
> 7.) AT&T will not budge on the purchase price. And since they will not
> budge, they are hoping the troubles with @home will force people to leave
> the service (and go with AT&T's broadband service), thereby reducing the
> number of subscribers, devaluing @home, and forcing @home to sell at the low
> price.
>
From what I've heard in the DC area, there's been a huge surge in folks
signing up for DSL service. This was on Friday night I heard this. The
point was being made that even if you were trying to bail out to alternate
service, it could be weeks before the backlog was worked through.
In the end, @Home's motion will likely have backfired for the very reason
you cite above -- there are many people around here who may end up ditching
Comcast_at_Home, just because of the uncertainty. The judge ruled in @Home's
favor because the cable companies were working hard to achieve their
alternatives to @Home, rendering @Home's servers, etc. an asset of rapidly
diminishing value. Thus, he reasoned, @Home should be allowed to do
whatever they have to in order to protect the value of that asset. In the
end, though, the judge's decision may have accelerated the decline in
@Home's assets.
>
> 8.) And since AT&T is playing hardball, @home disconnected AT&T users but
> still has service to Cox & Comcast.
>
> Personally, I would pay a bit more for cable modem service. I have had
> almost no problems. There are supposed to be @ 4.5 million users. If they
> raised prices $10 a month then Comcast would be making $4M a month. If they
> were able able to renegotiate a better percentage then they would be in even
> better shape.
>
To be honest, around here, Earthlink DSL is only $10/mo. more than
Comcast_at_Home (less when you account for the cable modem rental). Since it
is almost impossible to achieve the theoretical speed of cable, I have to
wonder if DSL isn't *effectively* as fast. (I've rarely seen connections
faster than 100K/sec and essentially never seen 200K/sec, especially since
Code Red/Nimda, because there continues to be a background of traffic that
has never ended from the time these critters started out.) Earthlink also
provides more e-mail addys and far more webspace, and quotes a speed of
1.5Mbps down/384kbps up. If Comcast raises it's price, I'll have some
serious thinking to do. Probably I'll try to pitch to a manager that
expanded addys and webspace would be a nice perk for those who didn't jump
ship...
>
> I have read some articles today that say there is a very good chance @home
> will come out of this and no one else would be affected.
>
> And getting downloads as high as 300k per second is a wonderful thing.
>
Would if that were true!!! I find that there's still probably a good 90-95%
of the sites I visit that simply can't support that kind of throughput on
*their* end, whether due to too many users or too little bandwidth to start
with.
- Eric.
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