North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: @Home ordered to shutdown at Midnight
> Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 15:49:55 -0500 (EST) > From: Sean Donelan <[email protected]> > Sender: [email protected] > > > > On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Robert A. Hayden wrote: > > AT&T couldn't move people off of @home because there was still a valid > > contract in place, until Excite broke it and turned off service. > > I don't know if [email protected] had a different contract with AT&T, but > Charter Communications moved 90% of its subscribers to a different > upstream by Saturday. Charter's spokeperson said they only had a few > thousand subscribers left on @Home. Charter's VP said they had teams > working for the last two months in preparation for the cutover. > Charter's actions seem to demonstrate that when management thinks its > important to get the job done, it gets done. > > If Charter could do it, I would expect other providers could have done > it, if their management wanted to do it. Not really. Cox, Comcast, and TCI (now AT&T) signed up as initial partners of @Home with equity stakes and exclusive contracts that prohibited using any other Internet service until some time in 2002. (June, if I remember correctly.) Many other, mostly smaller cable companies signed up with @Home, but were only customers and they ha contracts that did not prohibit other service. In other words, the contracts could be terminated with notice from either side while the AT&T contract could be cancelled only by mutual agreement. The bankruptcy judge can an did terminate this agreement, so AT&T could start switching over at 12:01 am on 12/1. Customers in Washington and Oregon are already converted. The latest guess for the SF Bay area (where AT&T is the dominate cable provider by a huge margin) is supposed to be switched over by some time on Tuesday, although there is so much work to be done here that I find it hard to believe that they will be ready by then. In the meantime the bond holders seem to have reduced the value of @Home's assets to about a quarter of what they were last week. The idea that they would come out head in this totally baffles me nd how they convinced a judge to agree with them is a bit surprising, too. Sending from a dial-up connection. :-( R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: [email protected] Phone: +1 510 486-8634
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