Care to comment on ATHM's position in this model?
I just want to remind you that we're all moving to a free access model. I think our departed ceo/chairman said as much a year or so ago.
The fact is that DSL has high customer setup and now they want to raise their acquisition costs, which are already much higher than @Home's. I say great, let them do it, it'll light a fire under somebody's butt... @Home.
HP and Dell have been selling PCs that are configured for broadband for a while. For the longest time if you wanted an off the shelf PC with a NIC card you were looking at a Win NT machine, finally they have PCs with NIC cards and Win 98 at the retail stores. Not that it is that hard to install one, unless, of course, the customer has screwed around with the PnP settings before you got there.
I work on a lot of friend's PCs and I usually spend at least a half an hour straightening out the PC before I can install or upgrade anything. You open up the device manager and there are all these exclaimation points, you look on their hard drive and there are 50 .chk files, you do a scan for *.TMP files and you delete 300 mbs of useless trash. They have so much tray trash loading it takes ten minutes to boot. You ask them what they did before you got there, they say, "Nothing, I didn't do anything, it just crashed."
Then I say, hmmmmm.... must be the DF module. |
