[[[ Excite@Home HAS gone dark !!! ]]] -- CableModem customers stranded!

12/01/2001 | Lazamataz

[Lazamataz]

I'm an @home customer, AT&T to be exact. At 8:15 CST, I no longer could access any pages. Not google.com, not cnn.com, none of the old standbys that ALWAYS work.

I've heard a lot about the poaaibility of @Home pulling the plug on 4.1 million customers. Did it happen? The only reason I can connect at all is that my lovely and gracious fiance also has a dialup account for when she is on the road, and I am calling in here using that. I am presently on hold on the AT&T@Home help line. I'll have more information.

Technically, the light is on but no pages are being connected. My Cable Modem is up and connected but nothing loads.

[jackbill]

Seems like AT&T is the only cable company that pulled the plug on @home. Cox and Charter (mine) are still cranking. AT&T wants to put pressure on @home so they get to steal them for $304M.

I'm still connected (Mediacom on MD Eastern Shore), but have my fingers, arms, legs and toes crossed.

I'd hate to go back to dial-up. My phone line won't handle more than 26.4 kbps. And DSL is not an option.

I find it strange if AT&T is the only one shutting down. First, they own about 23% of Excite@home; second, they are hopeful of getting the rest for $307 M; third, the creditors (the folks who loaned Excite the money) are the ones who have been trying to shut down the whole system to drive the sale price up, which would make AT&T pay more.

If AT&T is allowed to buy Excite (a hearing is to be held on 12/5 I think, with the same judge), they plan to bundle it with the rest of their broadband, and sell off the whole bunch. The most often mentioned potential buyer is AOL. How do you like them apples?

[VA Advogado]

Cox and Charter (mine) are still cranking. AT&T wants to put pressure on @home so they get to steal them for $304M.

LOL then they can jack up the prices on people like you to subsidize the AT&T customers. American, whadda country.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

This ain't bleeding edge.

Dave S. doesn't seem to agree now, did he.

[RadioAstronomer]

The problem is it's slow. My cable was getting average of 4.8Megs. (680k download speeds).

[Kay Ludlow]

State College PA ia also out - around 9:15 this AM. Glad I didn't cut my earthlink account yet!

[capt. norm]

Can't fault you for wanting to save money but MSN is severly limited. Typical cable speeds average 50 times faster.

Here are the results I got from the test site that was posted:

** Speed 3421(down)/1113(up) kbps ** (At least 68 times faster than a 56k modem) Finish.

I run two computers from it (Comcast gave me two IP's) and the speed is terrific especially on big downloads. Another big advantage to cable is that it gves you a static IP address (as opposed to the dial-up where you get the next one, if any, available).

[RadioAstronomer]

Hey, my first computer was an IMSAI 8080 with an ASR-33 teletype for a terminal. :)

[Kay Ludlow]

I should have said AT&T in State College PA...

[RJS1950]

I lived in Sioux Falls from age 9 to 19. It was and is a great place to live, not a particularly small town then or now. Besides people say the same about Omaha where I now live and they are wrong about that too.

[TomServo]

Thanks for the report!

[VA Advogado]

I should have said AT&T in State College PA...

Lets hope those Naughty Lions have a better day today than you've had so far.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

LOL Remember that? Amber screened monitors and HUGE 20MB hard drives.

When I started 300 BAUD was unimaginably fast, the only hard drives with 20 MB were on Big Blue machines, and we had to keypunch our JOB cards. But one of my colleagues had started when all programming was done with soldering irons!!

[RadioAstronomer]

A very close friend of mine was a charter member of the Homebrew computer club in Palo Alto. :) Built his first 12-bit machine out of discrete chips (no microprocessors). :)

[VA Advogado]

Hey, my first computer was an IMSAI 8080 with an ASR-33 teletype for a terminal. :)

Today, your digital wrist watch has more computing power than this.  Amazing.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

And that makes it a very good place to live.

True, true, little nippy come January though, I hear (my father was from Ely, MN 100 miles NORTH of Duluth.

[mlo]

Using AT&T MediaOne cable modem in Fresno. I'm still here.

[Kay Ludlow]

2nd quarter and they're still ahead!

[meyer]

I think its important to find out who initiated the shutdown, AT&T, or Excite. This will all come out, but right now, there are many P.O.ed customers who want their internet back.

[Freedom2specul8]

That article seems promising...so I gather it's basically saying that they are probably going to renogiate the same contract they already have...with the names of the players possibly changed?

[capt. norm]

Hey my old Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II (the big one, then) kept its entire system on a 512K (not meg.) 8 inch floppy that used only one side. Thanks to 80_Micro magazine and the users who contributed articles & program listings, we soon learned that by punching one extra hole in the floppy (for the optical device that senses the disk) we were able to flip all of them over and use the other sides thus increasing the capacity to an unheard of megabyte total. The whole TRSDOS operating system fit into the bottom of 64K of memory while the so-called video paged in when needed fro &HF000 to the top. We could use that space for anything that wasn't video just fine.

My favorite for storage efficiency was the TI-99-4A (Texas Instruments) that allowed any audio recorder to saave data to. This enabled me to write huge files to my reel-to-reel machine. Even with such a Rube Goldberg rig, it never lost a byte.