AT&T@Home Customers Shut Off

from the wonderful dept

Sat, Dec 1st 2001 11:12pm — Mike Masnick

Okay, so after discovering that my cable modem wasn't working this morning, I spent the day far (far) away from a computer, and just got back to read all the news about what's going on. First, Excite@Home denied they had shut anyone off, despite massive reports of outages. Then, AT&T and Excite@Home finally admitted, that, yeah, they had shut off the network and it will take anywhere from 2 days to "weeks" to get people back online. At this point, I'd also like to post an article from August where a "cable analyst" said this would never happen. His quote: "They're not going to wake up and find they don't have cable broadband anymore." Funny, that's exactly what happened to me. Of course, my prediction is that this will turn out to be a huge mess for the creditors who forced this to happen. If they had just accepted AT&T's offer, then people would still be happy. Instead, you have a few million extremely pissed off customers - some of whom won't come back. They've single-handedly hurt the value of the network they were claiming was worth so much more. If I were AT&T, I would pull my $307 million off the table just to screw those creditors. AT&T is building their own network anyway, so why not leave those creditors with nothing. It's not like any other bidder has come along to offer more.

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Brent, 3 Dec 2001 @ 8:20am

ATT back up
Was down over the weekend. Took a little less than 20 minutes and both my computers are up and running.

The apparent changes which ATT has made include:

- capped upload and download to 128kb/s & 1.5Mb/s (was getting 900k up 4Mb down)

- email is using @attbi.com vs. @home.com

- no word on forwarding any old @home.com emails to new server.

- lost static IP address (now using DHCP)

Other than that it seems to be working fine.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Mike (profile), 3 Dec 2001 @ 8:50am
  
  Re: ATT back up
  I appear to be back up as well... Those same caps are in place (though, I had already been capped at 128 upstream, I had been getting 3Mb down, and that appears to be gone). I never used my @home.com address so I don't care.
  
  So far, I'm pleasantly surprised that it just took 2 days to get back up and running - but I'm still waiting for some other mess to come from this. I'm sure I'll now get a $300 "initialization" bill or something like that.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]