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

To: ahhaha who wrote (10135)	6/4/1999 12:47:00 AM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Courtesy of Dave Horne & his work with Hotbot: AT Home readies SOHO service zdnet.com by Karen Bannan, Inter@ctive Investor Broadband service provider At Home is trying to make better use of its bandwidth. The company said its @Work professional services arm will announce later this year a "tweener" service designed for telecommuters who have outgrown the consumer-oriented @Home Network service yet aren't in need of its more powerful @Work business service. The new service, tentatively called @Home Professional, is designed for the small office-home office user, said Don Hutchison, @Work's senior vice president and general manager. The service will run over the company's Hybrid Fiber-Coax infrastructure or via telephone-based Digital Subscriber Line technology and will cost between $40 and $200 per month, depending on the connection, he said. It also will be tied to @Work's Web hosting offering, so small businesses can create and post larger sites that theoretically will garner more traffic, he added. The company's @Home offering costs between $29 and $49; @Work typically runs $200 and more. "This is a service we'll see in the third quarter for people who need more than the 128-kilobit-per-second upstream bandwidth that @Work affords them, but aren't large enough to justify a full @Work package," Hutchison said. Recently, At Home lowered the bar on its connection to its network - the upstream connection - from 750 Kbps to 128 Kbps to help curb system abuses, a company spokesman said. While the loss of bandwidth won't affect most users, telecommuters and users in home offices have complained about the change in service. Some have accused the company of trying to push them into the more expensive @Work product, a claim the company denies. At Home said the move was made to help conserve system resources. The @Home Professional service will be part of a total revamp of the company's service offerings, Hutchison said. The new offerings will include a customized version of the Excite portal for use in a company intranet. The portal could include special versions of human resources or financial software with Internet connectivity. The company also plans to roll out a fault-tolerance program for midsized and large @Work customers. The new service offering, called Fault Tolerant Internetworking, is de-signed to give customers a constant link to the Internet, even in the event of a service outage. Under the plan, customers will have physical connections to two or more Internet service pro-viders, one of which will be @Work. One ISP would manage the connections and handle the hot transfer if a customer's main service went down, Hutchison said. Aside from the initial installation fees, customers would pay one monthly service fee to their ISP. One analyst said the service is a good addition to @Work. "We've done studies that say that network reliability is at the top of the wish list for business customers," said Patti Reali, an analyst at Dataquest. "So this fits right in."