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

To: Erik T who wrote (7493)	4/8/1999 6:20:00 AM
From: Michael P. Michaud	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

the article said it is not installers, it is TCI's lack of upgrades

To: Erik T who wrote (7493)	4/8/1999 10:06:00 AM
From: Ainsworth	Respond to of 29970

My cable installer came to my house at around 7pm and was here til after 10pm. He had one more install to do that night. My best estimate is that one installer can put in 1500 connections per year, and my worst case estimate is at 1000 connections per year. So only 1000 installers would mean a minimum of a million connections per year. The fact that TCI failed to aggressively upgrade its facilities and missed its subscriber targets is much more distressing than the lack of qualified installers IMO. Heck, my installer was even government subsidized. Right off the unemployment lines with no experience running cable. Took him over 3 hours but he got it done. Thank goodness I already had an ethernet card though. The thought of him inside that box makes me cringe.

To: Erik T who wrote (7493)	4/8/1999 4:55:00 PM
From: Randy Ellingson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 29970

There is obviously a lot of demand for ATHM's product. However, will lack of installers restrict growth? Considering driving time, running new cable throughout a house, connecting to the computer and configuring the software, how many connections can one ATHM or cable installer put online in a given day? I just had TCI@Home service installed yesterday in Lakewood (near Denver), CO. The installer wasn't completely convincing or clear in his statements, but he told me he could do five installs in a day. I had asked for an average, and he agreed that number was probably about three in a day. He then said something about there being 1 installers in the Denver area (seems a little low to me), and that they were doing about 500 installs a week. These numbers don't pan out to 500 per week, and I couldn't get him to clarify. He was worse than me at cutting people off when they're asking a question;-) He is essentially a TCI@Home employee, and actually now an employee of the TCI division of AT&T. 500 installs a week in the Denver area would be a decent rate, but that may be the scheduled number rather than the successful number of installations. My wait time from signup to install was only about four business days, but that number appears to have risen to about seven business days afterward (from talking to a customers service representative who called to confirm the installation date/time (which was magically pushed back 24 hours from when I first arranged the installation with the dude in SD, CS who sold me the service)). The installer was very knowledgable, but fell slightly short of having/taking the time to answer all of my questions. His Dell laptop showed about 210 kbytes/sec on a 34Mb file download. My P166 showed just 6 kB/sec! he said (correctly) that he didn't know exactly what the history of my PC was, and there were too many different things that might have changed in the Registry etc. which can affect performance. Then he blew out of there. Fortunately, after poking around the web a bit I found some info on speeding up the cable modem connection; changing a couple Registry settings bumped me up to about 100 kbytes/sec, so I'm in decent shape now. There's probably more improvement to be had, and I intent to fine tune soon. A while back, I had installed (and subsequently removed) Wingate which I had used with a 10-Base-2 two-PC LAN to allow the non-modemed PC to gain Internet access through the PC with the 33.6 modem. That may have been reponsible for the Registry settings changing. Anyway, I stayed up way too late last night surfing. Thanks for whoever mentioned the Matinee site for broadband -- definitely cool programming on that site. I wish there was a source of high quality music, e.g., ~40 kbytes/sec streaming. The .mp3 files sound great of course, but that is apparently not a streaming technology at this point. I'll also be on the lookout for more live video programming. Much of the live video on the web is for 56 k modems (about 6.6 kbytes/sec), and very poor quality relative to the 100 kbytes/sec rate. Randy