Excite@Home may pull plug Friday 11/30/2001

[Travoli]

Bankrupt cable Internet access provider Excite@Home said Tuesday that it could cease providing service to its 4.1 million U.S. customers on Friday if it cannot renegotiate agreements with the cable companies that carry its service.

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5100012,00.html

[Mike_Mackin]

per COX

"they will provide service and there will be NO down time"

Email was sent to all COX employees yesterday.

(edited by: Mike_Mackin at 2:01 pm (gmt) on Nov. 28, 2001)

[Travoli]

Phew, I was worried I would be on a dialup next week.

[Mike_Mackin]

More info [washingtonpost.com]

[grnidone]

Think how many little online businesses this will hurt.

Little businesses that might be strong enough to weather this economy otherwise, BOOM they lose their email service and web site during the holiday buying season. Even if they are out only for a few days, it could really be a punch to the gut.

I know of one little online business that was hurt by this. All of a sudden, she lost everything. And the kicker is when she called to get information about the account, the reps couldn't even access her information.

[Mike_Mackin]

Cox, Comcast, Rogers Cement Deals With Excite@Home to Keep Access Open

MORE INFO [ap.tbo.com]

[minnapple]

Disclosure Needed.

I have always been a firm believer in a having a backup ISP online.

dialup - dialup
cable - dialup
dsl - dialup

Lately with all of the reselling of services I am concerned that a primary and backup service could be provided by one company. A business failure would affect both services,

I wish resellers would/should openly disclose who their suppliers are so buyers can protect themselves through diversification.

Hosting is another market that needs wider disclosure.

[grnidone]

Interesting article:

[news.cnet.com...]

Interestingly enough, we were only down for a day. I was very surprised it wasn't months. I still believe the timing of this whole thing could still have hurt some online businesses.

Minnapple is right: always have a backup line. We learned the hard way.

[littleman]

ATT initially got us back up here in the bay area in two days, but now the network is down again. The phone lines are so bad here that I am limited to a 28.8 connection. I tried to get a tech guy on a chat, but I was in line with 1,300 other people waiting for a clue. So for now I'm driving down molasses lane.

[bmcgee]

It took 6 days for recovery in Chicago. Within hours of the shutdown, we were contacting DSL companies. Discussions with them proved that that day was tremendously busy for those other providers!

Anyway, although the network was back up for us after 6 long, suffering days, the network was bogged down ridiculously. We still worked off of dialup, because it was FASTER than our cable modem access.

A month later, things are great. The speed of the network is faster than it was before on Excite@Home, I believe.

[rogerd]

AT&T had us up in 6 - 7 days, too, and we had good performance right away. We did see our measured bandwidth drop from 1.7 Mbps to about 1.3 Mbps. Not bad for a cheap residential connection, though.

One thing I noticed: has AT&T hijacked 404 errors? Is there a browser setting for this? Now I get an AT&T page instead of the usual browser generated page. If the site has its own error page, of course, that isn't affected.