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

To: ERM who wrote (3422)	12/16/1998 7:10:00 PM
From: Dad of The Rock	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Ow that hurts. zdnet.com Broadband Disappoints Customers By Louis Trager High-speed data connections have barely started taking root with consumers, and already some of the bloom is off the rose. Cable modem customers in At Home Corp.'s maiden market in Silicon Valley were up in arms last week about access speeds sometimes slower than dial-ups -- that is, when the connection was not crippled altogether. The debacle in Fremont, Calif., feeds into concerns about cable company service and the shared nature of the connection. Coincidentally, a new survey shows consumers favor telephone companies as broadband providers. That Yankee Group study also indicates price sensitivity could dampen hopes for a residential bandwidth cornucopia within several years. In Fremont -- At Home's oldest market, with about 5,500 customers -- circumstances conspired to strike at the heart of the sales pitch: access speeds 50 times faster than dial-ups. "They are taking in revenue and not providing the service all these customers signed up to get," said customer Dan Calic. At Home (www.home.net) and local partner and majority owner Tele-Communications Inc. identified three culprits: TCI circuit upgrades for ongoing technical tests of telephony, which cut customer data and video service a few minutes at a time; a malicious hacker "arping on the network," or effectively transforming a PC into a router that kept the network from recognizing users and sent data into a black hole; and most important, At Home's accidentally making a 128-kilobit-per-second cap that was imposed Nov. 13 two-way. The speed curb was intended only for uploads, to keep "bandwidth hogs" from improperly running businesses like Web publishing off the $40-per-month consumer service. "It's not rationing bandwidth," At Home spokesman Matt Wolfrom said. "It's just network management." At Home is investigating why the problem went unremedied for two weeks. The hacker was taken off the network, and Bay Networks Inc. modem software was installed to prevent any recurrence. Distraught as they were about access, users were livid about long hold times and misinformation from TCI (www.tci.com) customer service. "It's a very cumbersome, unconsumer-friendly procedure you have to go through," Calic said. Wolfrom acknowledged his company and TCI had communications breakdowns. A TCI counterpart, Andrew Johnson, said tech support employees "weren't properly equipped to deal with this" after two years of much smoother sailing, and they are being instructed to escalate calls better. Wolfrom said At Home's customer satisfaction levels have been higher than 90 percent, and the Fremont fiasco has not prompted cancellations. But the problems can only feed preconceptions about bad cable service and spotlight bandwidth constraints and security vulnerabilities from neighborhoods that share network facilities. "We will split the nodes to keep the speeds we've promised customers in place," Johnson said. "In the end, [the] @Home [service] is still going to be faster and cheaper than [x]DSL." Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL) is high-speed access from telephone companies via conventional phone lines. Cable modems have a big lead on xDSL, but phone companies have an opportunity to exploit the superiority of their reputations, said Yankee Group analyst James Penhune, adding that he doubts they will take full advantage because of their marketing shortcomings. In The Yankee Group's survey, three times more respondents picked the phone company over the cable system for high-speed service. Still, the research firm predicts 60 percent of residential high-speed customers at the end of 2002 will use cable modems. By then, availability of high-speed data will reach 60 percent of households, The Yankee Group projects. Narrow Market For Broadband One-third of online households are strong candidates to buy cable modem or Digital Subscriber Line service, but fewer than one in 10 say they are very likely to do so -- even at the industry's rock-bottom price. Projected to the general population, prospective penetration lingers in the single digits.

To: ERM who wrote (3422)	12/16/1998 8:44:00 PM
From: ahhaha	Respond to of 29970

I only adopted the term informally. In my TCI cable area, the rate is set by local authority although there is contiguity among various authorities. The companies simply adopt whatever is allowed. They don't set anything. There is no option to compete on price short of loss leader strategy which would send them into bankruptcy. This regime exists because the people demand protection from presumably profiteering cable companies. The government fixes price to protect the people. Trying to rationalize this away won't work. It boils down to a conspiracy of the people through government to destroy themselves. It's the worst aspect of self-centered me-only modern fairness short term thinking. When it brings about bad consequences, the people blame cable companies. In a sense they should be blamed, since you never give the customers what they want. You give them what you want. If they don't like it, they can go somewhere else assuming government rules haven't precluded the possibility of somewhere else. Unfortunately, this philosophy isn't part of the chic jingoism dominating current mindless business decision making. MSFT gave the people what they want. They added bells and whistles to their products because that's what the people wanted. The problem was that their products became bloated with complexity and useless bells and whistles. The complexity compromised the basic functionality and we all are suffering accordingly. MSFT gave the public what they wanted, and the public gave MSFT a law suit for competing indolent non-competitive tech companies into the near Stone Age which was in the public's interest. Government never does the equivalent. Government sues and interferes with the natural working of the market place. If MSFT had told the public to shove it and used the extra dollars to improve their existing products without superfluous additions, there never would have been the frivolous case that now is falling apart. This is the essence of free market capitalism, the freedom to do what you believe to be in your own greedy interest including not being a running dog for the quixotic public. The long term oriented capitalist has to think in terms of how to make money, provide what's needed, and not be manipulated into their own worst long term interest. You can't do that under government auspices.