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

To: FR1 who wrote (12225)	7/10/1999 12:24:00 AM
From: roly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

ATHM is a victim of bad press and uncertainty. Please correct if I'm wrong. I thought that HSAC is a mini version of ATHM except Paul Allen uses his cable system as the pipe line. If this "open access BS" should affect ATHM, shouldn't HSAC be also? Why is HSAC (P/S = 1117.6) up 20% today and ATHM down 1.82%(P/S = 189). ATHM must focus on increasing their subscribers. This is their best offense against this open access. Investors will realize the potential of the company and will come back. The worst combination is for this open access drags and ATHM not meet their projected subscribers nos. Don't expect any good publicity from the media (CNBC ,etc). I bet they realize the potential of cable internet and consider them as a threat. I thought I read a comment by Bell that before Excites merger with ATHM, he thought that Excite will be a takeover or acquisition target by one of the media giants. Now with the merger, it could be the other way around. It's good for these politicians to line up for open access which is AOL. This will backfire. People hates politicians. I though I also read that the reason open access is not possible is because the cable lines cannot be allocated to ISPs. Even ATHM claimed that the test by GTE and AOL was rigged. Why not come out and say "OK, WE ARE FOR OPEN ACCESS IF YOU CAN FIGURE HOW TO DO THE PROPER ALLOCATIONS TO ISPs" Finally, does ATHM owns any intellectual property or patent on the use of cable for the internet? Thanks for any info. back to lurking... Roly

To: FR1 who wrote (12225)	7/10/1999 6:07:00 AM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

I don't know what is going to happen in Canada either. A great deal now depends on how the regulations are implemented. It will be very interesting to hear the details, possibly many of the ISP's will lease from ATHM. The government rarely regulates an industry to its death. Usually it just chokes it until every breath is a tedious agony. You get life, but nothing thrives. ATHM has gotten a pretty good head start in Canada and I don't think there are a lot of people strongly loyal to any specific ISP such as AOL here in the US. I think @home still will have the large majority of customers. But I'm really only guessing. I'd love to hear from some of you folks from Canada. What will suffer the most I expect in the long run is the performance of the network. Thanks to the Canadian government cable will degrade naturally to the point where you pay a little more than dial-up and get performance a little better than dial-up. That is the natural economic balance point when noone has the power to prevent it and everyone has to share the same finite bandwidth. Eric

To: FR1 who wrote (12225)	7/10/1999 1:58:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Hi Franz, "Does it mean that any ISP is allowed to use the cable lines? I thought we could not have hundreds of ISPs tied up to the cable internet system without slowing it to a crawl." While I do believe that T and the other large operators should step back and give this thing another look, there are some inescapable laws of physics that are getting lost here, such as your question suggests. The open advocates have created such a draw to their cause - call it hype- that it is easy to get caught up in their thrall, while falling victim to denial and ignoring the obvious. And when that happens folks lose sight of the practical side of the matter. This tends to alter level-headed thinking, even by those who should know better, and creates the sense that they could aim immediately for the bulls eye. This form of hysteria, of course, is something that is almost always accompanied by a sense of ill-conceived impunity, and it will get everyone in trouble when the pols succeed in achieving their self-serving ends without allowing for the proper evolutionary measures taking place in the underlying architecture, first. Said changes will take time and money, and it's up to the MSOs to devise a systematic approach to a scheme of allocations that make sense for everyone. They are major stakeholders here, lest the activists forget. The practical side of the matter which I alluded to above is that open will happen, and the MSOs' own fortunes will be best served if they offer the interconnection and media sharing solutions in a proactive fashion, instead of having solutions imposed upon them by politicians and SIGs. And while I'm at it, I should also state that the impediments to integration will not be uniform across all MSOs and smaller cable operators. Those who support already maturing services such as ATHM and RR, while supporting DOCSIS rollouts, will have a harder time achieving integration (openness) than those whose cable modem services are already open, or who do not point to a single closed intranet, already. Having said this, then it follows that not all cable modem operators' scenarios are equal, which probably calls for a more intelligent level of policy setting (if one truly needs to be set) than the openists are suggesting. FWIW. Regards, Frank Coluccio