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

To: yihsuen who wrote (12570)	7/17/1999 1:49:00 PM
From: Jing Qian	Respond to of 29970

There are discussion before over here, what I have learned is POSSIBLE, but not quite mature yet. Yes, as a technical person myself, I can guarantee you that technically it is possible to modify the systems to handle multiple ISPs. But the question is how economically feasible to do so. It's difficult to do and it is costly. And at this very moment there is not yet a proven way to do so without disrupting the existing ISP on the wire, i.e., @Home. Cable is not as scalable as telephone line. That's why T/ATHM doesn't want to do that. Assuming the cable is forced open tomorrow, AOL is not likely to get on the cable smoothly. T/AOL will have to invest a lot of money to redesign the systems, getting all the bugs squared away. This will take a minimum of 3 years. So your estimate of 30 month is safe, mostly likely much longer. Each day passed without open access will strengthen ATHM's bottomline. My rational analysis: It will take at least 2 years after all the litigation, political movement and pricing negotiations to officially open the cable line. After that, it will take another 3 years to redesign the systems and work out all technical problems. T and all of ATHM's partners will not start redesign the networks until the network is officially open. So, as far as our stock is concerned, the only risk is ATHM's own execution.