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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: vish ramamurthy who wrote (12140)	7/7/1999 9:24:00 PM
From: ftth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Here's a nice summary of all the recent problems with this service. Nothing new really; it's all been posted in pieces before. BTW, I'm posting this message from a dialup account I had to activate today out of my own pocket because this unreliable @home service is out again today (all day). Since their wonderful network diagnostics they brag about so much still can't help them find the problem after an entire day, I'm assuming it will be down for days so I had to buy and activate an alternate service. They refused to pay for my dialup account. WHAT A GREAT COMPANY!!!!! They've really learned a lot from past mistakes!!!! ========= This Is Broadband? Excite@Home Hits a Customer Service Wall July 6,1999 Joseph Laszlo Scott Drobner Excite@Home drew ire from subscribers recently by instituting a limit on upstream bandwidth. Customer service problems are likely to grow as network upgrades lag behind subscriber growth. Web ventures should be skeptical of extravagant claims from the cable ISPs. Excite@Home Limits Speeds, Increases Ire. To help meet surging customer demand and to combat negative coverage of its bandwidth capacity problems, Excite@Home has introduced a new initiative, dubbed the On Network Advantage (ONadvantage). Excite@Home will cap upstream bandwidth at 128 kbps and implement traffic-shaping router technologies. Limiting upstream bandwidth is something of a tempest in a teapot; however, when the broadband market is itself the size of a teapot even a minor issue has the potential to stir things up. The implementation of ONadvantage was a public relations failure: Subscribers perceived it as a degradation of the service levels they had been promised, with no compensation. Moreover, a leaked memo regarding ONadvantage coaches customer service personnel to keep the policy "low-key in the eyes of the subscriber" and "to avoid talking about it...if possible." Being more open about the policy and adding a new tier of service without upstream caps might have helped defuse customer discontent. Local Problems Harm National Growth. While Excite@Home has maintained generally high customer satisfaction, consumer complaints are starting to pile up, suggesting that the shared infrastructure is being strained in some areas. Approximately 1,000 customers in the Bay Area have encountered so many problems that AT&T stepped in to offer five months of free service. Similarly, thousands of users in Hartford also struggled with slow service in January after what the company called a "larger than anticipated growth in network traffic." Excite@Home states that node congestion will be addressed quickly, but deploying new plant is the responsibility of the multiple systems operators (MSOs). These upgrades have been slow to materialize, and foot-dragging by even a few MSOs reflects poorly on Excite@Home as a leading national brand for cable broadband. Don't Make Promises You Can't Keep. Depending on the provider, the throughput that cable modem users receive has been advertised to the public as somewhere between 10 times to 1,000 times faster than dial-up. Potential customers who hear these claims can easily be deceived into expecting more than cable ISPs can deliver: actual cable modem speeds never reach their theoretical maximum. The number of users sharing a cable node (200 to 2,000 homes, depending on the provider) and their activities on the network directly impact potential bandwidth. Depending on the quality of the individual MSO's initial and subsequent network upgrades, cable ISP service can slow to near-dial-up speeds during peak usage hours. Online Ventures Should Proceed with Skepticism. Jupiter sees two primary implications of these customer service problems for online ventures. High partnership and advertising costs for Excite@Home are based at least in part on rosy forecasts for the growth of the broadband market (see Broadband Barriers: Partnering Effectively with Dominant Cable ISPs, May 1999). If early adopters grow disheartened by tales of poor customer service, ventures taking the broadband plunge may find that the audience for their messages will be much smaller than anticipated. Second, to the extent that Excite@Home has made bandwidth claims to online ventures, either downstream or upstream, ventures should question whether they represent actual, average, or best-case scenarios. Upstream limits will affect some potential applications providers, including those planning to offer videoconferencing, online photo storage, enhanced home page design, and, potentially, games and consumer video streaming. Downstream problems during peak hours impede the ability to deliver streamed or downloadable content, and go to the very heart of the promise of broadband versus narrowband services.