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

To: E. Davies who wrote (24351)	8/1/2000 7:16:26 AM
From: matt gray	Respond to of 29970

Add to your list the "real" two way upgrade rate for homes past. Were I live statewide we are less than 20% two way upgraded. Nobody wants one way downstream and dial up upstream service which CATV has offered in other areas.

To: E. Davies who wrote (24351)	8/1/2000 4:21:58 PM
From: KailuaBoy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Lets do on topic for a sec: The heart of the reason we all own ATHM is the assumption that there is huge built up demand for broadband and that people are going to be crawling all over themselves to get to it. The market however has no such faith. I'm assuming that the huge pent-up demand is for "Internet access" and that the default option for that access is becoming "residential broadband" much the same way that there was a huge pent-up demand for personal computers and the default option was the latest PC or Mac. I believe that the applications that are enabled by the technological step forward will make BB a necessity and not just an option. Right now it's still in the stage where someone has the ability to choose narrowband and not incur too much pain (except for the dialing in which is not trivial). Is this true? Or is it just a "first adopter" syndrome? Is the demand still greater than the supply where @home has already been available for 6 months? We all all basically internet savvy people by definition. Of course we want broadband. What about your neighbor? Your kids best friend? I'm guessing that as you canvas younger and younger groups of consumers you'll see a general shift in attitudes like this: Older - I don't care about the Internet except for chat and email. Keeps me in touch with my loved ones. Don't change what I have if it is going to make it complicated. Middle - What does it cost? Does this mean that I'm going to pay my awful cable company even MORE money? Will I have to pay my crappy phone company MORE money? If not...sounds like something I may look into. (Bundling services into one bill with a lower overall cost makes sense here and would drive sub growth. What if you could get rid of your phone company and have phone, Internet and cable TV on one cheaper bill?) Younger - A cable modem is part of who I am. Hilfiger clothes, I never miss Love Line or TRL (Total Request Live), can't believe they haven't kicked the naked guy off Survivor and I wouldn't even think of having my friends over if I had a dial-up Internet connection. Rich graphics, the latest thing syndrome, on-line games (males) are core features of this set and should not be considered as luxuries. Youngest - Don't know what dial-up is. I want people to do a canvas of the status of demand for @home. Find out how long the wait for install is. Find out why people still are not signed up. We did this kind of thing very thoroughly a year ago. Its time to ask again. How is @home penetrating established areas? How is @home doing vs. DSL in areas where they overlap? Will @home need to lower prices to increase penetration? Good questions. We should all do this. I'll ask around. I am not representative as I have a 1.5mb DSL line in the city, by the way it's slowing down. I need to do some speed tests but I believe the lack of infrastructure is making the platform start to creak as more people sign up. I have a weekend place where I have dial-up and it is PAINFULLY slow. @Home service is available but I haven't switched because it is telephony return and I don't want to bother with having someone drilling holes in my house and installing more phone jacks, etc. I suspect this will change soon as the current service is so slow that I can't effectively use the Internet. I'll let you know what I go with. I haven't even considered wireless. KB

To: E. Davies who wrote (24351)	8/1/2000 5:32:02 PM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 29970

I want people to do a canvas of the status of demand for @home. Find out how long the wait for install is. Find out why* people still are not signed up.* I do this continuously, primarily because I'm the one in my family that everybody asks about tech. My sister-in-law from LA came in for the weekend and the fist thing she said, "I got DSL, I'm so happy with it." I asked why she went with DSL when @Home was available in her neighborhood (I knew this because I'd plugged in her zip code the previous year, she had felt she didn't have the money then) Her reasoning for choosing DSL, which I found hard to argue with, was that she used the same line she used for the modem and so she didn't need to run any new cable (she didn't have CATV) and because she got her DSL from the phone company she had line sharing, so her voice phone was available over the same line and the number stayed the same. She knew that her access was shared when her line got to the CO, but it was so much faster than what she had been using and cost about the same, so she didn't care that cable would be faster. All the people I have sold on the idea of @Home are still waiting for upgraded cable. I finally gave in and ordered DSL for my studio because AT&T has a small business deal that is hard to beat and it might be a year or more before they offer cable here. OTOH I have a client that just moved halfway across the country and when she gave me her email address it was an @Home address. I said it was great that their new house had cable access and she said, "My husband would not have moved there if it didn't."