Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 15:49:55 -0500 (EST) From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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 Excite@Home 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: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634