Previously, Jerry McBride chose to write: > On Sat, 1 Dec 2001 08:56:42 -0500 > > Tim Wunder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Previously, Collins Richey chose to write: > > > Still no communique from ATT, and @home is still serving mail. > > > > According to our paper this morning, the judge gave Excite@home the > > go-ahead to turn service off. The cable companies are scrambling to > > appease Excite@home, now. I read that Excite@home gets $12/month from the > > cable companies for the network infrastructure and support. Seeing as how > > they do all the work, and have 90% (that's a pure guess, I have no real > > figures, but I've never talked to a Comcast employee for tech support) of > > the cost, I can see why they're in trouble. > > My view is this... I called for tech support exactly ONE time. As I was > passes from one support level to the next higher it became clear to me that > it was going to be a wasted experience. NO ONE there had a clue... Excite > isn't spending much of that $12.00 on it tech support staff. How many > millions of customers does excite have? > They make a ton of money... just like my cable provider Comcast. There's no > other place to go to... >
Well, you're wrong. If they made "a ton of money", I doubt they'd have filed for Chapter 11 backruptcy protection. If you bring in a billion dollars/month, but spend 1.1 billion, you're LOSING money. Their income does not cover their expenses, plain and simple. They have a billion dollars in debt. If their creditors accept AT&T's $307 million offer for @Home's assets, they'd still would be out nearly $700 million. Not exaclty a good deal. If they can renegotiate the deals with the cable companies, they can put themselves in position to recoup all of the money owed. If they manage to work out a deal with the cable companies, I doubt the cable companies would raise the monhtly fees (much). If anyone is making that "ton of money" from broadband, it's the cable companies. Their costs are, essentially, just for support of the cable lines. The very same cable lines they have for TV. Their costs to provide high speed internet access pale in comparison to @Home's. Yet, they get the majority of the monthly fees. They can take a fairly large hit on what they pay Excite@Home and still not need to raise their rates. > I'd hate to be in my cable provider's shoes right now... if they end up > pricing their comcast@home service too high... there's gonna be a big move > from cable to dsl... > > Here in New Jersey, entry level dsl connections start at about $49.00... As > a strictly @home customer I'm paying $42.95. Comcast isn't going to get too > much more out of my pocket before I turn into a Verizon customer. There is NO WAY on God's green earth that I'd become a Verizon DSL customer. Plain and simple. Especially for their entry level DSL product. Our sister company at work used their DSL service for a little while (they only have 2 PC's that need access) and it was nothing but trouble. I'll go back to dial-up before using Verizon. >From what I've checked out with a local ISP who provides Covad DSL, reasonably fast SDSL (384K, IIRC) and the ability to run whatever servers I want (unlike @Home's policy), would cost around $100/month. Still too rich for my blood. Their cheapest DSL product runs in the high $50's, I think. It's ADSL like Verizon's, but at least I'd be dealing with a local company, with good tech support (they provide my company's DSL and they're a pleaseure to deal with). Regards, Tim _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
