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

To: Paul Weiss who wrote (1213)	1/21/1998 8:22:00 AM
From: Melissa McAuliffe	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 29970

For what it's worth I have been thinking about @home vs. DSL and have the following thoughts. It appears that DSL will be available to many more homes in an earlier timeframe than @home simply because the cable companies cannot get all the homes upgraded before DSL is generally supposed to be available. Right now, (again this is only one person's opinion)people aren't dying to sign up for @home because of video on demand and all these other futuristic things. It appears to me that the big advantage is speed..which everyone wants. If DSL is 30x faster than today's speed and @home is 100x faster, I wonder... does this really matter? If it takes me 30 seconds on average to access a web page (or even 60) than DSL would give me 1 or 2 second response time which I would probably be perfectly happy with compared to what I have today. I will get @home because it will be available here sooner than DSL. But I am one of the lucky ones. I think that what will happen is that people will take whatever is available first. And once they get their new higher bandwidth (if it is DSL) the desire for @home will take a backseat until such time as @home provides additional capabilities that can't be had with DSL and which people feel they can't live without.. e.g. if DSL can find a way to eliminate log on's, disconnects, etc. in addition to giving me adequate speed I wouldn't care which service I had and would probably make my decision based on price. But I am a very heavy user as are many here and am probably more aggravated by this than your average Joe web surfer so there may be many people out there who wouldn't even care about this. What I think all this means is simply that @home's growth will be slower than projected. BUT...eventually I think we will possibly see many homes with both. DSL for those who want to still access the inernet using their plain old computer and @home for all the stuff which will eventually be available on the TV. As I said this is simply my personal opinion. And it is based on the fact that the difference in speed between the two alternatives might be irrelevant to many consumers. Also, I am still trying to sort all this out and learn as much as I can so if there is anything wrong with my thought process here I would welcome feedback. Melissa