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

To: Jing Qian who wrote (6126)	3/9/1999 7:47:00 PM
From: JakeSki	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Rolling out @Home service is a lot more difficult than AOL. 1) TCI must upgrade the plant. 2) TCI must upgrade the cable to leads to your neighborhood. 3) TCI must dispatch 2 technicians to every household to install. 4) And the installation sometimes is not straight forward. In my case it took them 3.5 hours and 2 phone calls to their lead tech for help. In 96, all AOL had to handle is 1), not 2,3,4. Yup. All these things are true. However: 1) I don't know if TCI was going to do this anyway 2) I think TCI was upgrading cable to support Digital Cable 3,4) This is true, they do have to dispatch techs. But once it is installed (at least in my case) it has been very reliable. A lot of AOL's complaints had to do with post-setup issues like busy signals, etc. So far, once ATHM is working it seems to be pretty stable. I think the were smart to use tech's. A little money spent on the front end probably prevents hours of tech support time and pissed of customers. And since they are charging for it ($150 for 2 techs and a working system at the end of the day is probably worth it to many people) they are probably making money on the install. Especially if most go smooth. -- George -- Jake

To: Jing Qian who wrote (6126)	3/10/1999 2:44:00 PM
From: trouthead	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

Was visiting some friends in San Diego. A wonderful place where athm is available. They didn't have it and weren't planning on getting it as they thought it would be too expensive. However I explained to them that they were paying for cable and they were paying for an extra line that they only used for net access and they were paying an ISP. ISP $20, extra phone line $20 and athm is, what about $40 to $50 a month. Seems a no brainer. The one thing I didn't know is do you pay for cable tv and athm seperately or are they a discounted package deal? Thanks in advance. jb