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

To: JayPC who wrote (18988)	1/18/2000 1:53:00 PM
From: gpowell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Calgary-based Shaw also reported its earnings were bolstered by a C$69.7-million gain from sales of stock from its portfolio, consisting of holdings in such high-flying technology and Internet firms as Terayon Communications Systems Inc. and ExciteAtHome Corp. Thanks for your support, Shaw. Its ShawAtHome Internet service, which provides access to the World Wide Web via large-diameter cable, attracted 37,000 new subscribers, translating into growth of 28 percent in the first quarter versus a year earlier, the company said. This is only a 23% sequential increase. Projections from @HOME were for an overall sequential increase of 35%. I hope that AT&T will make up the difference. I'd like to know why Shaw only had a 23% increase in subscribers at this stage of development.

To: JayPC who wrote (18988)	1/18/2000 6:48:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Jay, "Advantages to not owning it: You pay nothing for last mile upgrades (except in the form of higher fees to the MSO)." At what point in time? Now? Or in two or three years from now? If exclusivity runs out you can bet that the pricing structures will change, given that the pipes will be open to others as well, relegating the situation to one of supply and demand based pricing. I'd say that at that point, when the Internet connection becomes infinitely more coveted (especially if it is Lightwire, or even better, if it is pure glass), prices will go up to the service provider (in this case home) if they are still leasing from the MSO. "You pay very little for marketing (the MSO carries the brunt)." MSOs don't know how to market web and next generation Internet services. They only know how to market the access component, aided greatly by the fact that they are the only game in town supplying cablemodem. When the marketplace opens up, it will take being a lot more net savvy than the usual MSO front office is today to allow them to prosper. Marketing? It's meaning and execution would change dramatically if the right folks owned and designed the fate of their own medium (fiber), IMO. If the facility was pure and divorced from yesterday's television model, then starbursts would occur all on their own. I wouldn't be worried about how they got around to getting the word out, folks would not only know, but there'd be a line at the door. They could advertize on AOL, in fact. <smiles> You are valued as a pure internet company not an MSO (is that really an advantage?) Fair enough, although I'd like to turn that question around and ask, Is it good to be an MSO trying to cram digital Internet traffic onto an analog HFC model? Or, is it better to be an ISP implementing Internet traffic on a pure optical platform that was designed and optimized for Internet traffic from the start? The MSOs have allowed themselves only a measly couple of hundred MegaHertz on their HFCs to deliver digital video, interactive services, voice and HDTV. In contrast, pure optical would open up Tens of TeraHertz of potential to the ISP variant, bandwidth in this case that would not be constrained by coaxial and RF elements which make up HFCs. But the argument doesn't end there. The reason for having analog in the first place goes away when new genres of video program services) begins to go streaming, and then to full-bore digital real time, in its delivery format. Here, there is no contest between HFC and pure. The Internet-ready 10 Gigabit Ethernet-like platform segment (or even a fully transparent optical pipe for that matter) will far outperform anything that could be Rube Goldburg'ed over an analog HFC. Where video is concerned, if the ISP should elect to deliver it, it wouldn't even be television as we now know it in its analog form that would make this new model work, it would be video over IP or ATM. Data will subsume the classic television purpose, while delivering higher grades of service both aesthetically and feature-wise, probably a lot sooner than we all think. And if the ISP had the proper medium in place, in spades. Lightwire may begin to approach this native fiber capability in some really low number of situations (where was it that you said Armstrong lives?), but the preponderance of installs for the next five years + (unless someone really shakes the MSOs' trees) will continue to employ coaxial last mile sections and radio frequency spectrum allocation plans, straight out of World War II. Simply put, coax is not at all friendly to tomorrows bandwidth requirements, unless segments consist of only a few homes per cluster, and even then it would only be biding time, until grim reaper came for his final visit. At this point (in your statement which follows) I begin to wonder if we are talking about the same thing: <?> "DisAdvantages: The lines can be used by others and for other reasons and you generate no revenue (or perhaps loose revenue)." If, what? What did I miss? Have I been making the wrong assumptions here all along? What does your statement above assume? That ATHM owns the facilities? If so, please explain how you came to the conclusions that you did. If not, then I'd better re-visit my replies in this entire message. <smile> Thanks. Regards, Frank