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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axial who wrote (6905)	5/3/2000 10:40:00 PM
From: ftth	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

Hi Jim, you said: <<I'm in the middle of my own Last Mile conundrum: I'm moving, and have to switch from ADSL to @Home.>> I see in the press release below that @home is whining about "misleading ads" from Pac Bell. Well if that ain't the pot callin' the kettle black! I guess it was OK when they (@home) were displaying misleading and false (a little of both) claims on their website (as well as the websites of their cable affiliates), since it didn't cause a "competitor" harm (only the poor unknowing customer was misled). here's the release: Tuesday May 2, 5:42 pm Eastern Time Forbes.com Excite@Home, PacBell Make Waves By Amy Doan If this were a presidential campaign Excite@Home would probably say Pacific Bell has ``gone negative.'' Excite@Home has accused its rival in the war for high-speed Internet access of misleading consumers with its commercials. The ads, which run in California and Texas, suggest that cable-modem services such as Excite@Home's (Nasdaq: ATHM - news) are inferior to PacBell's digital subscriber line (DSL) technology because they use shared lines that slow down when too many people get online at the same time. For example, one PacBell commercial features a cheesy real-estate agent giving a family a tour of an open house. She draws back the living room curtains, and the prospective buyers see the whole neighborhood clad in ghost suits, trying to spook them away. In another commercial, neighborhood residents scream ``Log Off!'' at one another and call each other Web hogs. The ads end with the tagline ``Always fast...Never shared.'' But Excite@Home says that's wrong, because although a DSL connection from a customer's home to the phone company's central office is not shared, the lines connecting the office to the Internet are, which makes the service susceptible to slowdowns when Internet traffic is high. The TV spots prompted Byron Smith, Excite@Home's marketing vice president, to send a letter of complaint to PacBell President William Blase. The letter suggests that the company is considering legal action or seeking help from an advertising regulatory agency. ``It's factually inaccurate,'' says Excite@Home spokesperson Alison Bowman in Redwood City, Calif. ``PacBell's own service agreement states that the 'accounts operate on shared resources.''' PacBell, the SBC Communications (NYSE: SBC - news) subsidiary, begs to differ, saying that it's silly to look at traffic beyond the central office. ``If they're in a tizzy, it's because they're defensive about their own shared architecture,'' says PacBell spokesperson John Britton in San Francisco. But PacBell is going to modify the television commercials immediately. ``We'll add something like 'the circuit is dedicated between your home and the serving central office,''' says Britton. The spat highlights what has become a confusing choice for consumers who want to upgrade from poky dial-up connections to either DSL or cable modems. Although most telecommunications experts agree that cable modems can slow down during peak usage times, Excite@Home has put limits on upstream traffic in an attempt to make connection speeds more consistent. And with both technologies, speed is at the mercy of overall Internet traffic and activity at particular sites. Go to www.forbes.com to see all of our latest stories. ----------- BTW Jim, I think you have commenced the makings of a good discussion on mobile wireless connectivity. Hopefully some of the others like wireless wonk, Bernard, and transmission will air their thoughts along those lines. It might be instructive to start by outlining the current and near-term-future state of the european (esp. Scandanavian) markets in that regard, since they seem to be the farthest ahead and the most innovative so far (as well as having the greatest percent of users). I don't mean to lead the discussion in a direction you don't want it to go though. Just a thought.