Cable Firms Prepare for Demise of '@home.com'
By Christopher Stern
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 13, 2001; Page E06
Last week, AT&T Corp. scrambled to restore high-speed Internet service to more than 850,000 customers who suddenly lost it early on Dec. 1.
The interruption was not caused by a storm or other natural disaster; it was the result of a corporate showdown between AT&T's cable unit and financially troubled At Home Corp., the cable industry's leading Internet service provider.
AT&T had been planning to buy At Home, but at the last minute it decided to switch its entire customer base to its own high-speed network -- a tremendous undertaking for which the company had spent months preparing. It did not go off without a hitch, and there are still some customers without high-speed Internet connections.
But still, many industry observers were impressed by AT&T's ability to make the transition in less than six days. "It was not the car wreck it easily could have been," said Cynthia Brumfield, chief executive of Bethesda-based Broadband Intelligence.
AT&T Broadband attributed its success in making the move to AT&T's 100 years in the telephone business. "That's the benefit of having a parent company in the network business," said Sarah Eder, a spokeswoman for AT&T Broadband.
But building and managing a high-speed network is a departure for much of the cable industry, which has depended on At Home for the past three years to handle its Internet traffic.
There are 6.4 million homes and businesses that reach the Internet through high-speed cable lines. The supercharged access to the Internet is a byproduct of the cable industry's efforts in the past several years to upgrade its lines to provide more television channels.
Even with the additional TV channels, those cable lines have plenty of room for Internet traffic. Each system allots at least a single channel for high-speed Internet use, but additional space on the network can be set aside in neighborhoods with a concentration of Internet subscribers.
Cable companies such as Comcast Cable Communications Inc. are trying to follow AT&T's lead in switching their customers from At Home to their own networks. Under a court-approved agreement with At Home, the companies have until Feb. 28 to move their customers from At Home's network to theirs.
As Comcast and others make the switch, they have to acquire and install equipment to store and retrieve information and routers to direct packets of data around the Internet.
Most cable companies handle their customers' data traffic for only a small portion of its journey to the Internet -- from the time it leaves their subscribers' modems until it reaches the cable companies' local office. Those offices, also known as head ends, hand the data off to At Home or another Internet service provider for the rest of the trip through cyberspace.
But before the data or a request for data reaches the Internet, it makes a quick trip to regional data centers, now still controlled by At Home. It is there that e-mail is collected and stored and copies of frequently visited Web sites are warehoused.
The goal is to keep frequently accessed information as close to customers as possible. That way, when Internet subscribers call up a popular Web page, they don't have to wait for the information to travel through the entire Internet to reach their computer. They just view the copy stored regionally.
Any data requests that cannot be filled at the regional data center are forwarded to the proper destination.
Now that At Home is scheduled to go out of business in a little over two months, cable companies are building their own regional data centers and connections between the centers and the Internet.
If all goes according to plan, the data centers will be up and running well before the Feb. 28 deadline. Comcast's Washington area subscribers are set to be moved to the new network during the third week in January, said Dave Watson, Comcast's senior vice president of sales and marketing.
Watson said subscribers will enjoy new benefits as a result of the changeover, such as the ability to read e-mail from any computer with Internet access, not just the one hooked up to the cable system. They each also will be allotted up to 25 megabytes of storage in Comcast's regional data center for personal use.
Once the move to the new network is completed, each subscriber will download new software that will provide them with a new e-mail address. The first part of the address will remain the same, but the part after the "@" will be "comcast.net" instead of "home.com." The "home.com" address will continue to work until At Home shuts down on Feb. 28. |
