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

To: TWICK who wrote (3316)	12/3/1998 3:47:00 PM
From: JAMES BORECKI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

TWICK I live in Toronto, Canada and I've been using @home through Rogers Cable for the past 2 weeks. My experience is similar to the articles you have posted....very sluggish access. It took me 3 minutes to access the respond page after reading the articles. Waits of more than a minute happen about 20% of the time. Waits of 10 sec to a minute happen about 40% of the time and instant page changes happen about 40% of the time. The above applies to SI threads. I have no experience with any other threads so I can't compare. Downloading Video and accessing most other web sites is a flash. It's great...accept that I'm on SI 90% of the time. I haven't visited the ATHM thread before so if I'm repeating a theme that's been explored already let me know and I'll search back. Basically, I would like to know whether this is a systems problem and whether it is fixable or not. Otherwise I'll go back to my telephone ISP. Thanks in advance JimB

To: TWICK who wrote (3316)	12/3/1998 6:10:00 PM
From: Weimin Weng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Here is an article from today's San Jose Mercury. ******************************************************************** Posted at 9:46 p.m. PST Wednesday, December 2, 1998 TCI, @Home say glitches fixed BY JON HEALEY Mercury News Staff Writer Three weeks after cable-modem users in Fremont began complaining about extremely slow Internet access, officials at Tele-Communications Inc. and @Home Corp. say they've identified and solved the problems. The culprits included a botched installation of new network management software, modems that allowed one subscriber to snarl traffic across the system and customer service representatives who didn't pass along reports of trouble. The episode -- which reduced the vaunted cable-modem speeds to a crawl -- left red-faced officials at both companies pledging to respond more quickly in the future. ''We've learned our lessons here in managing the network,'' said Matt Wolfrom, a spokesman for Redwood City-based @Home, which has 5,000 subscribers in Fremont. The problems stemmed in part from @Home mis-installing software designed to limit how fast information could be sent from homes to the Internet. The software, which aimed to curb the heaviest users for the sake of average Web surfers, inadvertently slammed the brakes on information flowing in both directions. Some of the affected users said they were receiving information as slowly as they would have on a dial-up 14.4Kb modem. Separately, an @Home subscriber was misdirecting some of the traffic into a black hole in cyberspace -- evidently by improperly configuring a network of computers in his home. That subscriber has been removed from the system, Wolfrom said, and the cable-modem supplier has sent out an emergency software fix to prevent similar problems. A third problem was some bad circuits on TCI's cable network. Those circuits have been replaced or fixed, Wolfrom said. ''The customers are going to see, within 24 hours, the old @Home,'' said Andrew C. Johnson, a TCI spokesman. Fremont is @Home's oldest system, with the high-speed Internet service having started on TCI's cable network more than two years ago. ''The good part is, they get the good stuff first,'' Johnson said. ''The bad part is, as the laboratory, they get the hiccups.'' The hiccups have been few, several @Home customers said, but the response from TCI and @Home to their complaints about technical problems has been poor. Too often, they say, TCI's technical support desk gives conflicting explanations for problems, and neither company alerts customers when it knows there's trouble on the network. The two companies admitted TCI customer service workers were not routinely passing along reports about technical difficulties to @Home, which operates the high-speed network on TCI's cable system. Johnson said the two companies would address that issue right away. ''We're not doing as well as we can, and we've got to improve on our customer service,'' Johnson said. Wolfrom said the most troubling aspect to @Home was how long it took the companies to respond. How well @Home manages its network, he said, will be critical to the company's continued growth. That growth has been exponential in the past year, and the number of @Home users nationally is expected to rise from 50,000 to more than 300,000. For roughly $40 a month @Home offers speeds comparable to the expensive, high-capacity phone lines that many businesses use. @Home and TCI advertise the cable-modem system as being up to 30 times faster than the swiftest dial-up modem. Generally, though, the best ''downloading'' speeds -- the rate information flows from the Internet to the home -- are between 10 and 20 times the top speed of a dial-up modem. The top ''uploading'' speed -- the rate information flows from the home to the Internet -- will remain capped in Fremont at a little less than four times the top speed of a dial-up modem. Fremont is the first @Home city to be placed under such a speed limit, which was applied Nov. 13. ********************************************************************