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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium

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To: Mr. Big who wrote (30939)11/20/1999 12:10:00 PM
From: 2MAR$  Read Replies (1) of 108040
 
OK , was surfing this morning and found an exchange of excellent questions posed to E Davies whom I've percieved as an excellent and knowledgable person on the @Home scene ...enjoyed this exchange:

To: E. Davies (16809 )
From: Rascal Saturday, Nov 6 1999 7:49PM ET
Reply # of 17191

As of the last quarterly report @home MSO's have 21 million homes upgraded for two way service out of a total 72 million possible.

Tell me if I am looking at this right:
There are currently 21 million homes already wired with the functionality to get cable broadband..
Excite@home has 1 million subscribers...
of the 20 million remaing households ..
how many are using dial-up? ____________
how many have no clue about the internet__________

What is excite @home doing to:
#1 convert the dial-ups to cable braodband____________

___________________________________________________

#2 educate the non-users to the point where they will
buy internet/broadband.____________________________.

Does Excite@home only have 1 million subscribers because they only have 1 million households wired for their cable Broadband?

What % of total households wired for excite@home cable broadband do the 1 million current subscribers represent?
(I am trying to figure out penetration.)

Thank you for any facts you have handy. I'm just brain-storming. Don't knock yourself out trying to get the info.

*********** Now E Davies reply

To: Rascal (16811 )
From: E. Davies Sunday, Nov 7 1999 4:29AM ET
Reply # of 17191

Questions that go right to the heart of things. No easy answers but its good to be reminded of the big picture now and then.

of the 20 million remaing households ..
how many are using dial-up?
I'm guessing internet use in North America is roughly 50%. It was 30% about a year ago and obviously is trending to 90%. Dial up is almost all of that right now, with total broadband being somewhere in the 5% domain.

What is excite @home doing to:
#1 convert the dial-ups to cable braodband
Roll them trucks baby.
Right now its as simple as that. They can only do the installs so fast. When self install comes (~6months away) we will see what the level of demand truely is. My feel is that if people could do a no hassle signup *now* broadband (cable + dsl) penetration would be roughly 10-15% of all homes (something like 1/4 of all internet users). It is twice as expensive after all.

After that its about making broadband have enough uses to make it worth the extra money. People have to come to see broadband as essential to daily life. Hopefully Excite will lend a hand here, but content creaters all over the globe will be helping too. We are all waiting for the first killer app to hit: Video on Demand. No more movie rentals.

#2 educate the non-users to the point where they will
buy internet/broadband
The major push here from Excite@home is to disguise broadband internet in a form that people will accept. They call it "Interactive Television". The computer is now a set top box and the monitor is a television set. Presumably the software will be written to satisfy the needs of the non-technically minded.

Excite is also providing internet service (dial-up at the moment) for video game stations. Broadband is obviously next.

Your next questions were because of my own lack of precision in terminology. The current penetration *is* ~1/20, but its very hard to read anything useful into that for the long term because of the limitation in installation rate.

I'll guarantee you this: In 20 years what we call "broadband" internet will be as widely used as color television is today. Dial-up will be as common as the rotary telephone. Ever seen one of those?

Eric


....something tells me that @Home is about to go on a litle binge, must be all those commercials for tasting the Broadband goodness! LOL!
***But seriously I am having fits with MSN being slow-as-molasses this morning, I've got to take a break from here. I can't wait and truly can taste the Broadband goodness i'll soon have and finally be free from this exhausting "dial-up" 56K modem blues! I can almost taste the goodness! LOL!
:-)

2MAR$

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