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

To: ahhaha who wrote (3804)	1/3/1999 1:21:00 AM
From: Jing Qian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Just read the following from Cable Datacom News. What do you think? Is lack of IP telephony a big deal to @Home? AT&T: Good or Bad News for @Home? Through its acquisition of TCI, AT&T will soon become @Home Network's largest shareholder. Lately we've been mulling the question of whether this is ultimately good or bad news for the cable Internet service provider. Here's the "bad news" scenario first. After the TCI acquisition was first announced, we asked several AT&T executive about the impact on @Home. "We'll continue to carry them within our IP bandwidth," one replied. When prodded further he mentioned "@Home will never touch IP telephony." The message from this point of view is clear: AT&T will exercise total control over its broadband IP network. AT&T engineers will decide how its packet local loop should be built and managed to offer lifeline telephony, high-speed Internet access and interactive TV services. @Home had originally hoped to drive the deployment of these services by its cable affiliates. Now, of course, these services are bound to be offered in a unified bundle under the AT&T brand. AT&T's highest priority with TCI is residential telephony, adding another wrinkle. As has been widely reported, AT&T is continuing to shop its turnkey telephony package around to every major MSO. Following the @Home model, the deal covers key capital and operating expenditures for affiliates in exchange for a share of ongoing telephony service revenue. It is not unforeseeable that existing @Home affiliates, such as Cablevision, Comcast or Cox, would require a renegotiation of their current @Home revenue splits as a precondition of an AT&T telephony deal. Would AT&T sacrifice @Home to expand their telephone service footprint? Ironically, this last issue could be @Home's saving grace, leading us to the possible "good news" scenario. Assuming AT&T does sign up independent MSOs for its telephony package, it needs a service organization to manage deployments by its cable affiliates. @Home could potentially fill this role quite nicely. With more than 500 employees in place today, many of whom are dedicated to providing engineering, operations and marketing support to cable affiliates, it would be far easier for AT&T to leverage @Home's existing affiliate infrastructure than build one from scratch. One would think @Home would be compensated accordingly for the effort.