Talk:@Home Network

T-Mobile

There is also "Tmobile @Home" which is still yet to have been craeted but when it as been... There should be an @home page. T- disambiguation 174.250.210.59 (talk)→ — Preceding undated comment added 12:01, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

Changed article @Home to redirect here

The article @Home was redirecting to the Excite article. However, in reviewing both articles, it appears that it should instead redirect here to @Home Network. I changed the @Home redirect to point here. Dugwiki 17:53, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Wasn't it the other way around? Didn't @Home acquire Excite to become Excite@Home and they just went with the more recognizable brand in the forefront?

Sort of, Excite was 2 weeks from missing payroll and they were owned by Kleiner Perkins & Caufield, just like @Home Networks. This cash and non voting stock payoff was seen by insiders as away of exiting the original leadership. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.239.164.70 (talk) 23:11, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Being as the Excite founders and Tom J bought their coke from the same sources, it was a merger, rather than an acquisition. The Excite guys needed a stock boost to cash out, and TJ needed to appease his dark masters at Kleiner Perkins & Caufield.

Chronology?

As part of the agreement @Home's national high-speed fiber network access would be sold back to AT&T for $307 million in cash.

When did @Home buy the AT&T network?

If my memory serves me correctly that was after AT&T acquired the lion share of voting rights in Excite@Home (From buying out TCI) and then during the bankruptcy proceedings they said they would basically take over part of the network. no? CaribDigita 01:03, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I believe, but don't have a source to cite, that before AT&T bought TCI, @Home had AT&T build out its fibre network (@Home had an impressive network across the U.S. by the time it filed for Chapter 11). After AT&T bought TCI and became a cable player (and thus a partner in Excite@Home), and after Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy, AT&T ended up buying back the network it had originally built and sold to @Home. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.68.38.72 (talk) 20:40, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

You are correct. @Home owned a portion of the AT&T dark fiber networks. This became an issue in the later legal cases because in 2001 the board, controlled by AT&T sold the rights back to AT&T for under market value. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.18.187.23 (talk) 07:42, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Missing Villain????

The article of @Home is mostly correct, however there seems to be large parts of the story missing. Especially what was TCI/AT&T/Comast's role in stealing @Homes intellectual assets, not paying fully for services rendered and eventually driving a potential competitor out of business. All of this while being one of the trusted owners of the Excite@Home. Several shareholder lawsuits that been filed and settled. Unfortunatly the true story will never be written nor those who defrauded the company will ever be proscuted.

True, but I also think that TCI/AT&T, Comcast, Cox and the other MSOs realized collectively that the joint venture was bound to hinder the prospects of competition in future home data services--remember this was when things like VOD, VOIP, etc. were in their infancy. Everyone, @Home included, knew back in 1999 that the writing was on the wall. As cable operators - "old hat" RF engineers - gained expertise and experience working with "new kid" IP network engineers from @Home - they began to take more control, and everyone - including @Home - knew what was to come. The Excite merger was an attempt to move focus away from the data network--the primary focus of company attention and investment from 1995 to 1999--to content, which as we see, certainly didn't work out too well. Just my 2 cents. --67.68.38.72 20:22, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

@Home in the Netherlands

The @Home branch in the Netherlands is to this day still operational. See this site]. The company offers internet-access, digital and analogue television and telephony services via the cable network previously owned by Essent Kabelcom. I'm wondering how we can merge that info into this (or another) article. Any suggestions are welcome. ʍαμ$ʏ5043 16:04, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

The Dutch @Home hasn't been a branch from @Home Network for years. I'll add a paragraph about @Home Benelux BV (the full name of the @Home-branch that exists in the Netherlands). Fruggo (talk) 19:36, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

THIS ARTICLE SUX DIX!!!

I came here to find out why @home disappeared, and all I find is how wonderful everything was, then the single sentence "The merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations", then a description of a burning car wreck.

After reading this thing, I still have NO idea why my ISP disappeared. What's the problem with describing what happened? Does no one understand what happened, or did the guilty parties edit the article, or what?? TechnoFaye Kane 18:04, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

• AT&T was the main culprit... This is allll--- very confusing including the ownership structure... After I had worked on this article I realized I'd be a WP: Conflict of Interest since I worked at MediaOne for a while. MediaOne was the other cable company AT&T purchased (TCI and MediaOne becoming AT&T Broadband)....

Anyway AT&T Broadband(Ma' Bell) and many of the other network owners got into a fight with Excite@Home about how much they should pay Excite@Home to manage the content and stuff for the cable providers... The Cable Providers sort of thought it was an expensive and time-intensive process to handle the creation of Broadband-rich things at that time (because they were the pioneers...) The "bells" or phone companies only offered their expensive ISDN technology around that time and the majority of people were still on dial-up. Not to mention almost everything on the 'net was geared towards dial-up users... Thus the Internet over all gave you no incentive for having a "$40-$50 per month" Internet experience except for faster page loads... So all of the cable Cos. all partnered with Excite@Home or Time Warner for them to create all of these new fun sites/stuff that would make use of a nice fat "Broadband" pipe... In this case- they all just let Excite@Home do it.... Excite was bleeding red ink for months prior though- because the company used to spend money like G. W. Bush in Iraq..... Excite@Home's previous HQ was -er now is the current HQ of Yahoo!

Yup, conflict of interest. To be clear, @Home was not a content company, whough we created a great deal of it at the time. We were a cable modem company and we created the technology to manage and deploy such systems at a national level. This is why the company was created by a joint venture of cable companies and VC's.

• If @Home wasn't content then what was the actual role of Tele-Communication Inc? CaribDigita (talk) 06:16, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

• [1]... Try to find some old articles. Excite@Home used to be like Google they had all kinds of weird funky furniture in the office, they had all kinds of "grown-up" toys all over the office etc. Stuff they really never should have spent big bucks on... Anyway-.

The company made some huge gambles which proved bad for the future. For one, there were mass cries out by customers out in California that the network was too slow! Mainly because TCI (The largest of Excite@Home's customers) decided that they could place about 500 homes on a single node... This was around the time of Napster and stuff and eventually TCI had to spend money all over again to run new fiber-optics lines and to split these nodes down to something like 250 homes per node... And they've I believe since reduced that to something like 100 or 80 homes per node... Anyway, eventually Excite@Home ran up debts soooo high they couldn't pay their bills... Also, AOL which at that time was still just a dial-up ISP was leading a protest called the www.opennetcoalition.org trying to force legislation on AT&T (and other cable networks) to openup to rival internet providers.

Mostly right, the node splitting was and still is an issue in many locations. It was also a side effect of badly upgraded cable plants, barely performing modems annd unreliable CMTS devices. Keep in mind most of this was created in 3 years.

Now the open net coalition were actually a group of ISP providers, most long dead, who wanted to use the cable lines which they did not pay to upgrade for free to sell service to customers. This was a non-starter idea but it was pushed because it would delay rollouts into markets they had large interests in.

• The open Net Coalition was championed by AOL and subsequently dropped by them once they snapped up Time Warner Cable. CaribDigita (talk) 06:16, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Excite@Home, AT&T, Time Warner and others were spending quite a bit of money too--- towards a group called "Hands Off The Internet" ( www.handsoff.org ) it was a firm trying to say how investment should dictate who gets access to the cable company's "last mile" infrastructure.

Anyway AT&T also for a long time refused to merge their MediaOne customers into the TCI-cable company which they purchased first. And Excite was thirsty for some of those MediaOne customers. Part of the confusion was that MediaOne(prior to the AT&T buyout) had a financial stake in a small Time Warner unit (ticker symbol TWX), so MediaOne at the time really didn't want to leave Time Warerner's RoadRunner service and so on because it would make their stake's total worth drop.....

Sort of, actually it was because the MediaOne was a propriatary Terion(sp?) modem system and not DOCSYS, so it took a large effort to rip out and convert the headends one by one.

• Are you sure? Because MediaOne was rolling out the old LANCITY DOCSYS modems in 1994 after they changed over to dual-way communication. I still have it in my basement somehwhere. CaribDigita (talk) 06:16, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

• Later, Excite@Home launched a DSL service too called something like "Excite@Home in a box" it was sold in either Best Buy or Circuit City.... It was basically a DSL-kit that you could just plug in "in 3 easy steps" right out of the box... This was aimed at getting customers outside of their service area... I think the DSL service was provided though NorthPoint Communications?

Actually that was a cable modem using self provisioning, the ability of which was part of the reason they dropped RoadRunner.

• Excite@Home also had specifically a DSL offering that they touted called DSL ToGo I think...[2] CaribDigita (talk) 06:16, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

• Anyway in the final days Excite@Home's contact with AT&T was set to run out and Excite thought they could get AT&T to pay-up by allowing it to lapse and then just pull the plug-- on all of AT&T's customers until Ma Bell paid like a day or two later... But that was a badd gamble. AT&T was quietly building links into AT&T (Ma' Bells) own national OC-192 fibre optics backbone.... After all AT&T had fibre optics already in place all over the USA from before they became a cable provider.... So that led to AT&T just transitioning their cable modem customers to that.

Way off there, actually it was the same network, @Home owned back-haul rights to 5% of the fiberplants in AT&T. What really happened is the exclusivity agreement had come to and end and they decided to take the technology form @Home (some say stole) and build their own systems based on the @Home design. This is what most of the legal battles have been about. To make sure @Home died they withheld payment to @Home for over 9 months, causing a funding crisis.

• And when Excite plunged AT&T's network/customer into the darkness AT&T basically switched everyone over to their brand new " @ATTBroadband.com " email addresses. (which quickly changed a week later finally to @attbi.com) Excite literally killed themselves because AT&T (their largest customer) quickly learned how to manage without them.... Then the other cable companies in Canada started pulling their customers in tandem with AT&T until Excite had a bunch of network and no customers because the cable companies had all yanked them and put the customers back onto their own network. The stock was dropping for weeks and eventually got de-listed and that was it. It later became an OTC(over the counter) stock for a while.

• Anyway... Excite@Home also overpaid for many of their websites.

• Work.com called "@Work"
• Business.com
• IWon.com
• BlueMountain Greating cards etc.

• The company was great but it CONSTANTLY stumbled over itself. For example AT&T got upset (internally) when the AT&T Broadband strategy (led by the Cable companies) was to badmouth DSL in TV commercials... By doing that, this started to scare customers away from AT&T's WorldNet DSL service... Then-- when Excite@Home launched FreeLane, AT&T again got upset because this was making some paid dial-up customers of AT&T Worldnet who were leaving to join Excite's free Internet service. Likewise with the cable companies bashing DSL, customers were questioning why-- they should turn down cable in their area (owned by a Excite competitor) if it meant trying to get Excite@Home via DSL... It was a big mess.... AT&T no matter what the did always ended up competing against themselves or another part of their own company. And they inherited lots of complex agreements that they had to continue honoring after acquisitions and so on...

Another thing too. The US Government was pressuring AT&T to sell off part of their cable business because they had surpassed a market-cap set by the FCC...

There is no such restriction. Check the FCC regs.

• Actually there was... Go re-check ZDNet.com or CNET.com for newa stories from that time... [3], [4], [5], [6], [7]

• But here's the problem. If the person/company you're selling to knows that you are selling in-distress to appease regulators they wont pay you the real value of the offering..... They only offered less knowing AT&T might get pressured by the government to take the deal... So that was hurting AT&T too... Overall Excite@Home was a confusing ownership structure too between @Home + Excite + TCI which became AT&T and then partnering cable companies on top of that.... It was all tough to maintain...

Excite was not part of the ownership plan, they were bought for cash and non voting stock.

CaribDigita (talk) 04:14, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

AT HOME CORP SER A

what happend to this? 2001:A60:1552:1301:1D50:4E0:1607:8E4B (talk) 15:07, 22 February 2015 (UTC)