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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (18109)	12/21/1999 2:18:00 AM
From: KailuaBoy	Respond to of 29970

Frank, > ATHM has a huge leg up. The question will be, Can they stay focused and ahead of the curve? Or, will they follow in the steps of others who've become dominant players in this field. What's your guess? My guess is that cable will dominate for a while. The complacency that has defined the cable companies won't return completely due to the emergence of viable competitors. In the short run I think that cable has the best chance. Unlike most on the thread I do not want ATHM to have any protections from the cable companies. They are the ones who charge me $38.95 for basic cable and three channels of Gilligan's Island marathons. I say have cable and phone companies compete like hell for my $38.95. Give me HBO and long distance on one bill and I'll write my check to the winner. KB

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (18109)	12/21/1999 2:21:00 AM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

KB is trying to ask whether or not the "last mile" really is the bottleneck in getting data from the server to the user. I've long been asking the same question since even at 56k I can often see that my modem is not the primary limiter. It is so ingrained in the psychology that the modem link is the critical choke point that people simply take it for granted. It could very easily not be true any longer. ATHM has a massive advantage here if "the net" chokes on its own success. Nobody else has the national draw and content infrastructure to draw the broadband content providers to host directly on (or very tightly to) the @home backbone. The more I learn about "the net", the more I see that despite all the raw capacity they are adding the places where the networks come together will always severely lag, and routing is a tangled mess. I recently heard Milo say that a lot of the peering in the net today is still DS-3. There was also a lot of talk about how the physical places where the networks meet are simply too small to handle the equipment properly. I also have talked to a trader in Palo Alto who has 12 hops to a quote server in Cupertino. The web is an ugly place and not likely to get better fast enough to satisy demand. What amazes me most is how little this issue is discussed. I believe it could be the deciding factor in ATHM's success- yet no one seems to "get it". Or maybe I'm totally off base. Eric