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To: Robert Scott who wrote (5439)	2/15/1999 9:41:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 29970

Robert, and All, T's gesture recently regarding opening the cable modem plant facilities to all ISPs at some point in time down the road, 4 or 5 years, is only that... a gesture. It effectively means a hard lockout, for all intents and purposes. In 4 or 5 years, we may have another medium in the offing. There's one aspect about this virtual lockout that I don't fully understand, or, let's put it this way... I don't fully agree with yet, until someone explains it to me adequately. The reasons for ATHM and its owners not wanting AOL on their facilities must be entirely structural in nature, i.e., they haven't figured out yet from a technical perspective how to share bandwidth with other providers of content and web access/migration. If this is not a case of insufficient capacity on their systems, and if it is not a basic contradiction to the modality of cable system architectures to do so, then why would they avoid the revenues that they could be garnering from the lease of spare, or future built-to-suit, capacity? If AOL and Mindspring customers pay for port charges in connection with dial-up services, whose amortized costs cover telco-related infrastructure as well (parallel here is the cable modem head end facility), while at the same time, in many instances, paying for an additional POTS line, then what is so preposterous about these same users forking up a portion of their ISP fee (to be broken out and distributed by the ISP back to ATHM) for the privilege of riding over an MSO's, and then ATHM's facilities? Something is unspoken here. It's more likely a diligent dose of recognition on the parts of the MSOs that in short time their bandwidth resources on those segments will very likely not be enough for ATHM's own use, much less for one of its competitors. Otherwise, there's a whole lot of folks out there who have found permanent homes on other providers' portals who could be adding substantially to ATHM's and the MSOs' treasuries. At the same time this would allow ATHM to hedge against other unknowns down the road, through sales coming from a resale facility. All comments are welcome. Regards, Frank Coluccio