IP: 2 on ATT Broadband

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

From: "Dewayne-Net Technology List" <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>

[Note:  This item comes from reader Dave Mathes.  I guess that many of my 
readers can add their own AT&T stories to Dave's.  I too am in the midst of 
purging all things AT&T from my life!  DLH]

At 11:12 -0800 12/6/01, David Mathes wrote:
> From: David Mathes <dmath () ns net>
> To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: ATT Broadband
> Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 11:12:52 -0800
> MIME-Version: 1.0
>
> Dewayne - this is a rough draft of an article for a intl business paper.
> The essence is there although the paragraph order will change to meet
> newspaper standards of reporting. all comments welcome.
> Dave
>
> Broadband is great when it works. You feel like you are in control with
> fingertip information from all over the world. But as ATT has proved,
> it's only a temporary illusion. Surfing with broadband is normally easy
> and simple to find solutions to problems, make reservations, and even
> something as simple as email. At worse I can go back to DSL which was
> more reliable in a year than ATT Broadband was in a month.
>
> Last Friday that surfing came to screaching halt with a Denial of
> Service attack on me, the customer. At the center of the controversy is
> ATT, the once and mighty brandname that assured older folks of
> reliability and integrity. However, in ATT's latest deals there is
> nothing more than opportunism and treachery while selling a bill of
> goods to both customers and bidders of the ATT Broadband division.
>
> In September I switched from DSL to Broadband thinking that everything
> made sense. Technically, that is true with broadband being faster,
> cheaper and better. What I failed to do was understand ATT's strategy.
>
> Last week, ATT Broadband was in two bidding wars. One bidding war to buy
> services from Excite, the other to sell ATT Broadband as a company to
> others. Even though ATT is the majority stockholder, Excite is now out
> of the picture and bankrupt with the doors closing in March 2001. In
> what might seem to mortals as a conflict of interest, ATT is simply
> building shareholder value in spite of just about everything else.
>
> One should carefully look at the ATT Broadband ads this past year; ATT
> might be involved in giving bait-and-switch techniques a new meaning.
> Under the Excite Broadband, speeds were typically 1.5Mbps
> bidirectionally, and occasionally  in excess of 3 Megabytes per second
> were achieved. Now that ATT has eliminated Excite as a service provide
> and competitor, only 1.5 Megabytes will be available to the desktop, and
> any uploads will be limited to 128k.
>
> For those who bought the service on a special deal this summer, this
> comes at the same time when rates increase to "normal" levels.
> Furthermore, if ATT sells the Broadband division, even higher rates are
> guarenteed by the new owner.
>
> In calls to cancel the cable TV service any effort was refused saying
> that a note had been placed in my file, but I would need to call back on
> December 12th after the network was backup so that proper billing could
> be done all at once. There was great reluctance to do anything on the
> part of ATT.
>
> Over the next four days I received all sorts of calls from ATT
> companies: ATT Cable TV, ATT Broadband modem, ATT long distance phone
> services, ATT etc. First, ATT Broadband called at least once a day to
> have an automated voice tell me when the new and improved network would
> be up. First, it was two weeks. Then successively it was Friday,
> Thursday and then Wednesday.
>
> When I was finally able to access the new ATT network on Wednesday, the
> Broadband network was slower than a 56k dialup line. This is not what I
> paid for nor what I expected from a brand like ATT. Furthermore, it did
> not like my browsers (Netscape 4.5 and Explorer 6.x) requiring a new
> configuration. After numerous attempts, the Explorer browser only brings
> up one window - the ATT Broadband window claiming a bad configuration.
> As a network engineer I find this unacceptable.
>
> The bottom line result of this whole mess is that ATT is creating
> slower, costly, and worse services while bankrupting a company with a
> faster, cheaper and better product. Then ATT profits from these sham
> acts by selling the whole thing off to Cable providers.
>
> Luckily, there are choices. First, i switched the phone service to
> Sprint eliminated ATT. Then I switched the cable TV off and will move
> that to satellite. Now, I'm working on eliminating ATT Broadband as a
> service provider. And finally, I am going to scour my investments and
> encourage every fund manager to divest itself of ATT stocks.


[Note:  This comment comes from reader Steve Stroh.  DLH]

At 22:25 -0800 12/6/01, Steve Stroh wrote:
> From: "Steve Stroh" <steve () strohpub com>
> To: <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: RE: ATT Broadband
> Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 22:25:23 -0800
> MIME-Version: 1.0
>
>
> Dewayne:
>
> AT&T Broadband, and the press, has made much of AT&T's ability to cut their
> cable modem customers over to a new network in a week because of their
> extensive Internet capabilities and technical expertise. But the strain of
> the effort is really showing.
>
> DSL Reports (www.dslreports.com) offers forums for affected users, and some
> of the reports are very revealing. In some areas that have been converted,
> some older cable modems stopped functioning and apparently need to be
> replaced.
>
> For a company that provides critical Internet infrastructure to some major
> companies, the ongoing very well-documented DNS problems with the new AT&T
> Broadband Internet are laughably sad. If there is one thing, above all, that
> OUGHT to be a core competency of an Internet company, it's DNS.
>
> Those, like me, who seem to have fared best in the transition are those who
> have a router (the Linksys BEFSR11 seems pretty popular) as the only device
> connected to the cable modem, and our household (or small business) network
> behind the router. I was cautioned well in advance of my cable modem
> installation to NOT load the supplied "Excite" software, and that has proven
> to be very sage advice. My BEFSR11 "grabs" the supplied DHCP parameters, and
> distributes them through its own DHCP server to the computers on the
> household network. AT&T Broadband sees only one device being used (though
> the cable industry is said to be working on ways to detect this "theft of
> service"; I'm not worried - I'll be an ex customer by then). The one manual
> change I needed to make in the conversion was to POP an attbi.com email
> account (for service announcements) instead of a home.com email account.
> And, of course, use mail.attbi.com as the SMTP server.
>
> An interesting development is Nexland now offers a "SOHO" router with two
> Wide Area Network ports (cable modem and DSL, or two DSL). It load balances
> between the two WAN ports, and fails over in case of a failure on one of the
> WAN ports. The router also features a serial port to which an external modem
> can be connected, allowing failover to dialup with no changes to the LAN
> needed. This router features the usual 10/100 Ethernet switch, NAT, DHCP,
> VPN, etc. Impressive that such a sophisticated product exists for a cost
> well within a household budget.
>
> We'll need such options in the post-AT&T Broadband era. It looks to me like
> cable modem "Internet" service may well shake out mostly into one of two
> camps:
> AOL, or...
> MSN
>
> Neither of which is the least bit palatable.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Steve



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