Posted on 12/01/2001 5:52:05 AM PST by 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.
Secondly, I think AT&T did a pretty good job of communicating with us about this before-hand, and a pretty good job of getting a new network ready to go around Excite if this happened...
I was down for a total of 24 hours on a Saturday. I was very stressed at the time, but during that time they called me twice (have any idea what it took to make all those calls?)... and they were evidently working overtime, because I was back up before dawn on Sunday.
Scary as it was, I think the fact that we were all screaming when it went down indicates just how realiable and valuable their service has been. If I was still down, I might agree with you, but overall, I think they are working on fixing it as best they can.
I got the same message out here in Comcast land in Orange County CA. I called @home and they advised me to follow the instructions I received from Adelphia which basically state that you should set up an Adelphia@home e-mail account (I did) and deal with any incompatible @home browser software you might be running. Not a word from Comcast but it sure looks like they are going out of the internet business in my area. It is a mystery to me how Adelphia gets access to their cable system.
I did receive one email message before the outage. I almost missed it, because I don't use their email service at all (I have never sent a message using the email address provided by AT&T, yet I receive at least a dozen spam messages a day. Somebody [AT&T?] provided my email address to spammers).
AT&T was always good at providing raw bandwidth, but their ISP services (email, web, usenet) were lousy. Maybe their "new" network will provide the same bandwidth with the same reliability, but that's far from proven.
I'm sure most users will stick with AT&T, at least until/unless they demonstrate that they can't provide reasonable service.
Sincerely,
Johnny B. (still stuck with dialup)
For what it is worth... my speed test yesterday after the switch (using the site linked above in this thread) yielded the same result as Lazamataz (I think it was Lazamataz) had on the old network. I dont know how to post that kind of thing in here or I would have, I was so happy to see it. So far no burps in the new system. Been up now without a hitch since it went up.
My friend who also used a third-party for email also did not receive a lot of notice... Might have been hard to find you.
I receive no junk mail that I did not cause myself, and very little of that, once I cancel.
Good luck, I hope you are back up to SPEED soon!
OMG, T is utterly without shame! A complete bald-faced lie to their customers. It would be unbelievable, but in light of what they did to try to bankrupt and take over @Home, completely understandable. Is Armstrong wearing a cloak, calling himself "Emperor", and posing in front of the corporate Death Star yet?
25% of the common shares, upward of 70% of the voting shares is the info I saw. May or may not be correct, but AT&T definitely packed the board with their people, including Hart.
About two months ago, AT&T-controlled board declared bankruptcy after taking several questionable loans with questionable terms, which came due. In the very same press release that @home declared Chapter 11, they announced AT&T's takeover plans.
They still didn't know if the gambit would work, they needed a backup plan. From yahoo:
Since early October, AT&T has had some 400 engineers, software developers, technicians and other employees working 24 hours a day, seven days a week to construct a network capable of handling high-speed Internet traffic. Led by AT&T's chief technology officer, Hossein Eslambolchi, the telecom giant leaned heavily on vendors and raided its own inventory to deploy more than 250 communications circuits and more than 300 routing and switching devices, and to reach agreements with local phone companies in some cases.
"This had been like building a giant stadium in seven weeks," said an AT&T employee who worked on the project but declined to be named. "We had to build a foundation and put in the seats."
Now let's see, At Home at the urging of AT&T (which happened to control ATHM) hired Eslambolchi as the interim president who proceeded to learn everthing he could about ATHM's operation so that he could then start a plan and an infrastructure to start stealing it in October while AT&T still controlled ATHM and owed it a fiduciary duty.
Several AT&T crony board members quit just before bankruptcy hearings. What's the point of trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety? There's so much wrong here, on so many levels, that it's just incredible. The more I read, the more amazing it seems. Does the sheer brashness of it all prevent everyone from seeing what's going on, or what?
One of the things that really burns me is that, even though AT&T has an excellent dialup service, they didn't bother to offer temporary dialup access to their customers while they try to fix the mess they made.
Ping
Where did you get your figure? I got mine from the article linked in post #195. I didn't want to post the entire article, but here is the paragraph:
"Corporate America has been keenly watching the bankruptcy proceedings of Redwood City, Calif.-based Excite@Home, which became the largest Internet company when it was formed in a $6.7 billion merger of Web portal Excite and cable company @Home in January 1999. It remains one of the most high-profile and strained marriages of the Old and New Economies, with AT&T owning about three-quarters of Excite@Home's outstanding stock."
He he he he he he.
My dial up connection might suck, but... it just keeps humming along...
And my abacus has never stopped working.
Best regards,
My admiration for the IT drones who had to pick up the legal and finance guys' mess. Getting a network of that magnitude up in the time they did must have been quite an effort, and if they're a typical IT operation there'll be 10 propeller-heads with Christopher Lee eyes and 1500 managers ready to take the credit. You know who would have gone down if it hadn't worked...
I'm in the East Bay and I got the same message on Sunday, and was re-connected Monday afternoon. I'm actually impressed with how fast they switched me over to the new network.
It's still going to be a pain notifying everyone of the new e-mail address.
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