I tried to suggest (but heaven forbid anyone contest what ahhaha says) that problem one (management) can't be solved until AT&T (or whomever) steps in and wrestles control away from the puppets of the consortium of cable owners.
T has effective control of the board and the company. T is the largest cable owner (surprise). In light of these two facts your above statement makes little sense.
As for the slow rollout, I don't think that ATHM will succeed until they get self install kits.
If truck rolls were the issue then there would be a back log of installs, correct? There is a wait list, but it is caused by the service not being available within the local loop in some neighborhoods. Do you understand the difference between these two types of problems? If truck rolls were the problem then your "solution" would make sense, yet it makes no sense in terms of the other issue, which is that nodes are not available where people want the service. No amount of self install will resolve that problem.
>>In fact, I don't see how ATHM can meet its current estimates of sub growth without self installs.<<<
This is clear, that you don't see how.
Will self installs cause some technical problems? Of course; but I think that as more and more people use the self install process, the percentage of problems will drop (PCs will come cable modem ready; technicians will be able to walk people through fixes over the phone; web sites will crop up walking people through; people in general will adapt).
If you've ever run a network you would understand the nightmare associated with people screwing around with their setup and hardware. You have to ask yourself this: If you were upgrading something on someone elses computer would you rather go in clean before they do anything or after they have already screwed around with it? Each problem on the local loop has a cumulative effect on the node and can bring down the performance of the whole loop....as has been discussed by ahhaha in several posts.
What should ATHM do that AOL did? I'm not sure, but it's worth taking a look at. For one, AOL marketed the he%# out of itself and did anything else that it could to increase subs. AOL knows that once you reel a sub in, they most likely aren't leaving (the sub needs a reason to leave their precious e-mail address, etc.) unless something much better exists.
Because AOL exists pretty much keeps another AOL from forming. ATHM is not the next "AOL", it is the first ATHM. Different beast in a completely different ecosystem. Never buy the "next" anything, buy the first something.
I agree that there's a large amount of frustrated potential customers who want cable access (I don't think that they care if it's @Home or otherwise).
I would be particularly unhappy if my ATHM turned into AOL cable access, so maybe your assessment is not quite acurate. I might still use it if I had no other choice, but I would vigorously investigate options. Right now even arguing this point is, well....pointless, because people don't have a choice in cable providers. What they have a choice in is dialup, DSL, cable or satelite and wireless.
As for the deal they cut with their "owners" regarding the warrants, I think it was (as is often the case with ATHM) a good deal for the cable companies and a bad one for ATHM.
I wonder how you can be so sure of that. It would be in T's interest to lose the other cable guys. You implied as much above. T has staked their future on this company....do you think they really want C&C on their board? |
