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

To: E. Davies who wrote (12179)	7/9/1999 3:25:00 AM
From: Dirk Dawson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

I'd also like to see some substantial progress from @work. Agreed (if I get where you're going with that thought)! @Work can be difficult to deal with but I discovered why in the past couple of weeks. Background: I'm a Mac consultant in San Diego, one of the first roll-out cities. I've had the @Home version of the service since 9/97 and can count downtime in hours during that period. However, I have a couple of clients who are luckily not in the many business parks that have been passed by for cable upgrades in favor of residential areas. Cox@Home set these clients up with a minimum of difficulty initially, clients fell in love with the speed, and then as a result of a booming economy added new employees and needed more email addresses.... 4 to 5 days to add/delete an email address!!! No one available at Cox on a direct phone call! With one client, it was frustrating enough that we moved to serving our email internally to finally have some control. That took two weeks and was Cox's fault, not @Work. Minor SNAFU on @Work's part that Cox should have been able to determine and resolve if I could have gotten someone on the phone. I finally found an @Work number, got a helpful human on the phone and the problem was resolved in less than 5 minutes.(Sidenote to CMGI holders: CriticalPath handles @Work-hosted email services and is killer!) The tech at @Work told me that Cox is the most frustrating company that have in their stable of cable operators and he wasn't surprised that I couldn't get anyone. Get this: HE (the tech) has to use the same numbers we had to try and communicate and received the same lack of response! The @Home users all deal directly with @Home for support for anything other that physical cable problems (they bypass Cox) and that is probably why it runs pretty smoothly. The @Work customers have a Cox gateway to tunnel through for service, this needs to change. Dirk BTW, just to weigh in on the OnAdvantage issue: I'm in a officially limited upstream area (128k) as an @Home user. I run a small business and have a network attached and occasionally serve files to myself from home when I'm in the field. No big whoop, I'm not streaming or running a Hotline server. My clients are 15-30 user installs of @Work and signed an agreement to be limited to 128k upstream (the bottom tier). If someone at home (@Home, duh) needs to serve files out to the world at faster than 128k, they are probably doing business and should be charged accordingly. The hoopla from all of this is generated from people finding out there are limits to what you can get for $40/month, even if they would never begin to use that upstream bandwidth. That sense of entitlement (to be left getting away with something) really pisses me off.