In the interest of keeping threads shorter I'll put this here...

The lights are definitely going out on Excite@Home customers. It's being appealed, but apparently, the plug could be pulled tonight.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/665584.asp?0cm=c20

They're losing 6 million dollars a week.

--Dave

Yeah, I just read about this on Yahoo.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011130/tc/excite_internet_access.html

I realize just reading the snippets of what he said is unfair, but that judge sure seems to have a cavalier attitude toward the people who are actually going to have their service cut off, the customers.

I sure hope if any of my contracts become unduly burdensome I can come before that guy.

Amanpour

Funny, this is of course coming from the same state that allowed itself to become sluggish in power demands and eventually led to a crisis that affected the whole Southwest.

Stupid Californians. Always screwing other people with their problems.

No offense to any Californians, of course. Only you Liberals. =)

Well, you can't force a company to lose millions of dollars a week just because it'll remove internet access (not a necessity) from about four million people (maybe fewer). If anything, the judge is letting the market rule, rather than force a company to stay afloat in a losing situation, a very conservative point of view (and the right one in this case).

If Excite@Home ran a poor business model that couldn't work, there's no sense in forcing them to stay operational. And it's not fair to force them into accepting a VERY poor offer from AT&T, who clearly watched them go bankrupt with the express plan to buy them at pennies on the dollar, rather than spend money rolling out their own network (which is very expensive).

Companies go out of business all the time, frequently screwing over more people in worse ways than this. Stop being babies about it and get DSL. Or maybe go to a movie tonight.

I switched over from @Home to Charter Pipeline today. Actually a fairly painless move, all done by phone other than switching my email. Of course, now I have a gazillion people who have my @Home email address that I have to inform about the change - and who knows how many that I'll forget or miss that will simply get bounced mail.

OTOH - I now have a completely spam free email address (for a few minutes, anyway.)

"I now have a completely spam free email address"

Why don't you just get a throw away hotmail account for use on boards like these? I think stuff like these boards and Usenet are where most people lose with the spam bots. Whenever I sign up for anything on the web, I use my hotmail addy.

"Why don't you just get a throw away hotmail account for use on boards like these?"

I've actually got three email addresses - the one I show here is my "standard" email. I've got an older email address that I rarely use anymore. And then I have a "private" email address that is ISP independant that I keep completely spam free.

"I've actually got three email addresses"

That's the ticket. Should have known I couldn't teach an old man of the Internet, like yourself, a new trick. ;)

'Companies go out of business all the time, frequently screwing over more people in worse ways than this. Stop being babies about it and get DSL. Or maybe go to a movie tonight.'

Except in this case, the company is a common carrier. Do you think it'd be no big deal if a long-distance carrier declared bankruptcy and shut off it's network?

Obviously, a network backbone isn't quite as essential to society, but it's not like a lawn-mowing business or something equally innocous going under.

AT&T was complaining today that Excite is basically using the threat of shutting off its network to get more money from them. Can you imagine Sprint going bankrupt and then threatening a local phone carrier that way?

'Funny, this is of course coming from the same state that allowed itself to become sluggish in power demands and eventually led to a crisis that affected the whole Southwest.

Stupid Californians. Always screwing other people with their problems.

No offense to any Californians, of course. Only you Liberals. =)'

Technically, the power crisis arose out of deregulating only half the market (the producer side), while not the other. This allowed power generators to withhold supplies to drive up prices; the economic model for it works out about the same as cornering the market on copper.

Something like 2 or 3 times the normal level of plants were "offline for maintenance" for like 6 months straight.

"Funny, this is of course coming from the same state that allowed itself to become sluggish in power demands and eventually led to a crisis that affected the whole Southwest. [...] Stupid Californians. Always screwing other people with their problems. No offense to any Californians, of course. Only you Liberals. =)"

Given that the problem came from deregulating the power industry in California, I would say you have conservatives, not liberals to blame. Deregulation is a conservative issue, not a liberal one. I know certain people, such as perhaps yourself, consider a kneejerk condemnation of liberals a good substitute for an actual political philosophy, but liberals are the ones in favor of regulations on business. Conservatives are the ones who deregulate (i.e., get that "big government" out of the hair of our "hard-working innovators" like Microsoft and the power company). Clear 'nuff, sonny? Good.

California ought to have been building new power plants. Considering the way the environmental lobby likes to stand in the way of such things you can't exactly say the liberal element was blameless.

Brad Grenz

"If Excite@Home ran a poor business model that couldn't work, there's no sense in forcing them to stay operational."

Cool. So if I get into a bad situation as a consumer for whatever reason, I can just expect a judge to save my ass and damn the consequences? That's awesome!

I'm gonna start putting out insane offers on houses and cars right away. If I can't afford the deals I made today later on down the road, I'll just bail and trust our justice system to protect me. I love market forces.

Oh, and as for "who's to blame" on the energy thing, I think there's plenty to go around. But basically, any way you look at it, the consumers are getting screwed. We can squibble about politics all we want, we're the ones who end up paying. Always. As we are in the cable story that started this whole thread. The powerful protect each other. Sorry to quote O'Reilly, but there you have it.

Amanpour

I reported in the previous thread that the switch to Charter Pipeline didn't result in capped access. Well, now they've capped it at 1.5MBps, basically cutting my speeds to 1/3 of their @Home levels for no reason at all.

Bastards...

'California ought to have been building new power plants. Considering the way the environmental lobby likes to stand in the way of such things you can't exactly say the liberal element was blameless.'

California had the capability to produce nearly enough power before, during, and after the crisis; a lot of it was just mysteriously "offline." It didn't have a lot of excess capacity, as the boom caught them slightly off-guard, but enough was there. Basically, the power producers held just enough capacity offline to drive prices through the roof.

You can sequentially read the story of what actually happened through Paul Krugman columns:

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/121000.html
http://www.pkarchive.org/column/32401.html
http://www.pkarchive.org/column/42901.html
http://www.pkarchive.org/column/62701.html
http://www.pkarchive.org/column/21801.html

In other on-topic news, my AT&T/Excite news server is ip-banning me. Hmm.

Here in Portland, OR, I got switched over to "AT&T Broadband Internet" with little pain. No talking to tech support necessary. Got uninterrupted Usenet feed, and the retention on this new server even seems a little better.

The pain-in-the-ass part is that they instantly destroyed our old @home e-mail accounts and any unreceived mail, without warning. Luckily, I didn't use my @home address.

Here's a question, tho. Does the following statement on the new ISP's FAQ mean I'm getting screwed?

"Q: I understand that AT&T Broadband has changed downstream speeds. Why are you limiting downstream bandwidth?"

"A: The new AT&T Broadband network has been built to optimize our customers' high-speed Internet experience. This means that customer speed settings will be set at 1.5 MB downstream to ensure that all customers receive an optimized broadband experience."

I didn't keep track at my downstream rate before (not much of a tech head). Does 1.5 MB sound like a reasonable rate, or is this a decrease from typical @home speeds?

"Does 1.5 MB sound like a reasonable rate, or is this a decrease from typical @home speeds?"

Reasonable? I guess it would depend on what you were getting. For comparision, it's almost 30x faster than my DSL line, and I'm not frustrated with throughput.

Bottom line: if your area doesn't have a faster service at a similar price, you're only option is to go back to dial up.

"it's almost 30x faster than my DSL line"

Okay, I guess I'll call off my boycott. :)

>Does 1.5 MB sound like a reasonable rate

It's 1.5Mb (bits), not megabytes. Some people were getting 3Mb-6Mb with @Home, so if you were one of those people, your bandwidth was cut.

I can't get any of the Internet radio stations I used to listen to after switching to Pipeline. The signal goes in and out. Also, my Internet access already went down today for about half an hour. This doesn't bode well.

"It's 1.5Mb (bits), not megabytes"

OK. ~4x faster, not 30. Point being, it's still fast regardless of what it was cut from. But I hear ya, it's never fun to get less for the same price.

"I can't get any of the Internet radio stations I used to listen to after switching to Pipeline."

I doubt this has anything to do with bandwidth. One point five megabits is plenty fast for internet radio, which is usually like, what ~45-65 Kbits for stereo quality? It could be any of a host of different problems/issues, and may be intermitent. Not much you can do, I don't think.

The loss of service, on the other hand, is a bad sign. Hopefully it's just growing pains and won't happen all the time. Nothing worse than your ISP not being able to offer 24/7 uptime on a dedicated line.

>I doubt this has anything to do with bandwidth.

The connection is theoretically fast enough to support 128Kbps streaming radio, but if it can't sustain that speed, streaming audio and video don't work. Movies are sputtering now (they didn't before the switch), and music is cutting in and out from multiple streaming servers (something that never happened before the switch). The transmission is too inconsistent to support the streams, so unless it's a teething problem, I'm screwed as far as that stuff is concerned.

On the bright side my ping times in online games don't seem to have been affected. Also, I want to point out that I have no idea if the problems I'm having are inherent to the entire Pipeline system -- it may be stuff that's just affecting my area. Still, I don't understand why the service is so much crappier than @Home was.

Well, not that anyone gives a toss, but that new 1.5Mb cap does seem to be having a noticable effect on my downloadin' speed. It seems to take twice as long to download an article from Usenet as it did before.

Damn... My days as download king in alt.binaries.mpges.margaret.thatcher.nude may be numbered.

"connection is theoretically fast enough to support 128Kbps streaming radio"

You don't *need* more than 1.5 Mbps to receive a simple sound stream, Tracy. That's just crazy. And which stations use 128kpbs? That seems like overkill for radio.

Not saying that you don't have a problem with your connection, but whatever the problemss are, I sincerely doubt more bandwith would solve them.

"Damn... My days as download king"

Heh. I guess since I've migrated from dial up to DSL, I've never really had it where I could do some serious downloading at crazy speeds. If I want some software or any binary that's really big (=<100MB), it's going to take at least an hour. Much better than dial up, but it's not like I don't think about how bad I really want something before attempting a big download.

>I sincerely doubt more bandwith would solve them.

I'm not saying it would. It seems to be a matter of transmission quality, not theoretical bandwidth. If I get 1.5Mbps for ten seconds, then 2Kbps for ten seconds because their network sucks, there isn't enough data in the buffer to compensate. It all evens out on downloads, but isn't stable enough for streaming media. Hell, I'd take half the bandwidth they capped me at as long as it was as consistent as my @Home service was. 99% of the time it was rock solid.

The 128Kbps stations stream 128Kbps MP3s. They sound a hell of a lot better than 56Kbps stations. It's like FM versus AM.

It will be interesting to see if your service improves in the next few months. I'm assuming Charter Pipeline is a little overwhelmed by the sudden blast of new subscribers, and I suspect they will improve as more equipment and people are put into place. Cox was planning to take their modem customers in-house in about 6 months, but has had to push that date way up thanks to the bankruptcy judge's order. This is a good time to be a switch salesman as all of these new networks are set up.

From the customer perspective, none of this makes the changes suck any less.

"there isn't enough data in the buffer to compensate."

As a temporary workaround, you might try adjusting the size of the buffer in whatever player you're using. It takes a little longer for the show to start, but hopefully it's a little more steady afterward. In WMP it's under Tools> Options> Performance> Network Buffering. Good luck!

I don't really understand where these so-called caps come from.

Having two computers on my network, one an iMac and the other a PC, I can be download-happy on both and still never come close to having a slowdown in bandwidth.

I'm on DSl with 1.5mbps cap download, and I'll be downloading multiple files/video clips at 100k/s each on the PC with someone playing UT or something insanely bandwidth crazy on the iMac, no slowdowns.

Maybe it's just me, but I've always found caps to be a sort of ridiculous idea, especially when they don't seemingly work. Perhaps when the ISP's and the backbones wake up and realize that bandwidth is like air, and thus plentiful, they'll stop charging people out the ass for it.

...oh, who am I kidding, most backbones are phone companies, that'll never happen. Too money hungry.

And by the way, SiNNER, I would highly suggest not gauging your bandwidth by Usenet, that's just a bit... um... not smart. Usenet is a very, very wild service as far as connections are concerned.

Well, my service was down here in Seattle yesterday without warning; a recorded message on their help line indicated it'd be back up in three days.

Imagine my surprise when I found it was all back up this morning. They automatically copied the user and password information to the new email server, but now mail to the old address bounces. Pah, would it have been that hard to setup forwarding for a month or two?

Oh well, it went better than I expected.

'And by the way, SiNNER, I would highly suggest not gauging your bandwidth by Usenet, that's just a bit... um... not smart. Usenet is a very, very wild service as far as connections are concerned.'

It's entirely possible the news server is on the same local loop. You're better off trying to find a local university or company not on cable, as that'll show how you fast the path between the outer world and the cable network is, depending on traffic.

'Maybe it's just me, but I've always found caps to be a sort of ridiculous idea, especially when they don't seemingly work. Perhaps when the ISP's and the backbones wake up and realize that bandwidth is like air, and thus plentiful, they'll stop charging people out the ass for it.'

They need to put pricing information on bandwidth somehow. Caps are a lousy solution, but I suppose it's cheaper than bandwidth monitoring.

In an amusing loophole, AT&T's subscriber agreement says that you won't use a dynamic dns service for any of their ips, but it doesn't mention anything about using regular dns for one of them. Har.

In a not-so amusing loophole, DHCP here now gives you IP addresses with a lifetime of an hour or so. There goes my local webserver, blast it.

Doesn't matter. If you look up the DHCP spec, you'll see that it says the IP should go back to the same machine that had that IP in the previous session, except in case of catastrophic error. Think about it-- what if you were in the middle of a HTTP file download and they "switched your IP"?

There are ways to force people off, but that usually involves a service disruption of some kind.

The @home stuff came down here in Salem, OR yesterday too. Just had to redo the network setting from @home to ATT broadband. They sent out an email prior to the change warning about the possible changes. They said they'd be calling all the customers when it did happen to alert them of the new settings, but I never heard from them. But DHCP did most of the work and there was a website you'd be automatically redirected to with a reconfig applet. Most of the trouble I had was reconfiguring NAT32 so I could share the connection again. And my ISP email addresses are diferent now so I'm invisible to spammers again, but I need to resubscribe to some mailing lists.

Another interesting change is ATT Broadband is quoteing a download speed now. @home never did, but ATT is promising 1.5 Mbps. Hmm... The ATT news server has no posts, though.

Brad Grenz

Brad:

"The ATT news server has no posts, though."

Not true up here in Portland, and I'll bet we're using the same server. Could it be a problem with your newsreader? For me, there actually seems to be longer retention and better completion of articles with the AT&T server than there was with Excite. That said, it seems a bit slower. Give it another go!

Brad, I'm in Salem too, and I'm getting news posts. I had to switch the server over to netnews.attbi.com to get new posts. Outlook still wouldn't show the posts until I actually deleted the old news account and set up a new one - editing the account wouldn't work, for some reason.

-Matthew

I recently switched to a dynamic IP and use a service called dns2go.com that is really handy. It keeps tabs on what your current IP is and matches it up with a domain name in the format of (something).dns2go.com. It's free and requires you run a small program on one of your pcs behind your firewall that sends heartbeats to the main server but so far it works great.

'Doesn't matter. If you look up the DHCP spec, you'll see that it says the IP should go back to the same machine that had that IP in the previous session, except in case of catastrophic error. Think about it-- what if you were in the middle of a HTTP file download and they "switched your IP"?

There are ways to force people off, but that usually involves a service disruption of some kind.'

I know, but in the process of rebooting twice yesterday my ip changed twice, and it's different today that it was last night, without rebooting. It's officially too much of a hassle for the regular domain name I've registered, though I might get around to assigning a dynamic one to it.

netnews.attbi.com? Hmm, I think it said news.attbi.com somewhere in the manual reconfig instructions. I could download a group list from there, but every group was empty! I'll try netnews. Usenet was the only place I was getting really high speeds, 3 Mbps +, regularly. Wanted to test out that cap... Didn't go over 150 KBps when I downloaded the new Detonator drivers from nVidia using Flashget, so it looks like it's there. Now it's going to take me twice as long to steal digital bootleg movies!

Brad Grenz

Wow. Maybe you guys are just more into hardcore stuff than I am, but I haven't noticed anything different. I don't think my IP's even changed. Never lost service, that I noticed. Maybe we're just lucky 'round here.

Cox has signed an agreement to keep @Home's service until Cox gets its personal service up and running. According to the E-mail they sent me, it's estimated to be 3 months. After that time, Cox will switch to their personal cable modem network "as seamlessly as possible".

Sounds to me like I'm going to be seeing a rate increase in the near future...grrr.

Now I'm really wishing I could get DSL. Time to pester QWest to expand their service across the street.

Update on the move from @Home to Charter Pipeline: They have no tech support to speak of, no web page support, the speed as of today is abysmal, I can't connect to about half the web pages I normally visit during the day (they're up, I checked with my back-up dial-up service,) I can't connect to my "private" email server (it is also up, checked with my dial-up) nor its webmail back-up, and tech support took a message and said they'd call back. Right. Fortunately I can connect to my private email from my computer at work.

I loved @home after the first year - it's been reliable and troublefree and fast for me for a LONG time. This really stinks.

Ditto what Jeff said, along with dropped connections several times a day and various other problems. Last night I tried to play a 1-on-1 match of Unreal Tournament with a guy across town (who also is on the Pipeline network), and we'd get pings of 40ms or less for about five minutes, followed by pings of 3-10 SECONDS for five to ten minutes.

They're not exactly running an efficient network.

The carnage continues...

http://www.msnbc.com/news/665584.asp

---

Quote:

The agreements do not include Charter Communications, Adelphia and several smaller cable companies that are together known as the At Home Solutions Group. Internet service to those companies is being terminated, Excite At Home spokeswoman Londonne Corder said.

---

Clickable...

MSNBC Article

--Dave

"Last night I tried to play a 1-on-1 match of Unreal Tournament with a guy across town (who also is on the Pipeline network), and we'd get pings of 40ms or less for about five minutes, followed by pings of 3-10 SECONDS for five to ten minutes."

Hey, it's a good chance to take a breather and ask the guy if he wants to cyb3r.

On a small side note: AT&T is being sued by @Home's bond holders. They are claiming that AT&T planned this meltdown from the beginning so they could aquire @Home for a bargn basement price. Only when the press got involved and the bond/stock holders started asking questions did AT&T surrender it's majority voting position in @Home.

Going to be an interesting next year for the "broadband revolution". Glad that Cox is starting it's own network, but I have a feeling it's going to be a might bit pricier than @Home was, as well as much less reliable.

The stock holders rufuse ATT's offer, and now they're suing 'cause the offer was withdrawn. What a bunch of panty-waists. I'm not sure how you can lay the blame on ATT for @home spending way too much money on crap like web portals.

Brad Grenz