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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tang who wrote (27307)	7/28/1999 10:28:00 PM
From: JayPC	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41369

"If ATT strikes an deal with AOL, it has to deal the fact about ATHM first because it means 'death' to ATHM." not true, see my post: beta.siliconinvestor.com It would probably hurt its stock price, but many people are uniformed on what open access would mean to @HOME look at @HOME's website its a good place to begin to understand the technology home.net "To overcome the performance limitations of the Internet, Excite@Home has developed a high-performance "parallel Internet." While it uses the same underlying protocols to ensure compatibility and seamless access to everything on the Internet, @Home's network architecture is markedly different. Two key themes in @Home's network strategy are "pushing data closer" and "end-to-end management." To embody the first theme, Excite@Home uses a hierarchical, distributed network architecture with proprietary caching and replication technologies to ensure that the information a user wants is always "as close as possible" within the network. "End-to-end management" describes @Home's proactive network quality, service, and performance management systems. Because the network is centrally managed, @Home can avoid the "finger pointing" that plagues the general Internet, and dynamically identify and address network quality, service, and performance issues before they ever affect users." "Excite@Home operates its own national infrastructure, which connects to the global Internet at multiple Network Access Points (NAPs). The network also has Tier 1 peering with other national and regional Internet Service Providers. A high-speed fiber-optic IP backbone connects these access and peering interchange points to Excite@Home's Super Nodes. Excite@Home's 5Gbps backbone provides a high performance, cost-effective, scalable transport mechanism, as well as the capability to extend service to new markets without having to constantly reconfigure the network as it expands." It goes on to further describe @HOME's proprietary systems. This means that while AOL or anyone else could ask AT&T to open up the lines, the lines are only a small portion of Cable broadband. Excite@Home would not give AOL access to its network infrastructure for free, just like AT&T, Cox, Comcast, etc do not get it for free either. People confuse @HOME as just another ISP. It is not. It is the @HOME NETWORK regards Jay

To: tang who wrote (27307)	7/28/1999 10:28:00 PM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

Tang, the issue is protecting one's turf. Yes indeed, AOL is forcing others to use AOL and not MSN. MSN own the OPSYS (Win95/98, WinNT). AOL owns ICQ/AIM. It is the OPSYS that attracts computer users to MSFT and as a result of they rule and call the shots in the desktop and client server arena. It is ICQ that attracts users to AOL. As a result of which they rule and call the shots for the ISP arena and use "blocks" to hooks such as MSN. These hooks employ the universal standards (I am not certain about the details of the standards) but as a software engineer am very familiar with software interface standards. The fact of the matter is MSFT wants to make a point to the DOJ. I am a long term AOLer and have also made a killing in AOL stocks and I can extol all the benefits of AOL as a user and investor. But the point is that MSFT is at it again; thumbing their nose and have chosen a strategy that I find it hard to fault as long as AOL continues to act like this.