so now that @home is shut down what is everyone going to do?

[buggs1a]

ok, @home shut down the service. it's right now 3:30am Sunday morning in seattle, wa for me. i called them when it went offline yesterday and asked if it was cus of the bankruptcy and they said no, just an outage. so i went t bed and woke up a few hrs ago, 10pm actually. still offline. friend caled me and said they are offline totally now and he's in another area, still close t me, 15 minute drive or so, but he was offline as his bro in law, etc. Well i called at 12 am midnight this morning sunday, was on hold more then 2 hrs and they still have not picked up, so i hung up and it's still offline.

was just curious to see what everyone is doing around the country for isp access now that they are offline till they migrate customers into the new servers and systems etc. it's to bad @home didn't do what they said and tell the custors they were shutting down and what to do to go to the new system. they also have made no statement on their web site unless you dig VERY deep into it. i haven't seen it but my friend said he was on phone with windows xp microsoft support and the microsoft guy said he found it somewhere buried deep in @homes web site that they are offline mirgrating to the new att network etc.

anyway i am using www.nocharge.com which is a free isp in washington state. no time limits etc. no outgoing smtp support, but at least it works. so i can at least check email on yahoo.

in mac os x it was really simple to set up the account. so yeah for os x, cus i have forgotten how to set up dial up sine i hae ben with @home since day 1, Dec 20 2000 is when i got it in my area, i got installed on the first day i could get, so it screamed, yeah. it's funny too cus dia up 26.4k connection web pages load descent, in os x that is.

[buggs1a]

@home is now back for me. They migrated me. There are drawbacks.
less then half as fast now. it's now capped at only 1.5mb where i was getting 300k/sec-500k/sec mostly.
i can't connect via my linksys router anymore, but i think that's just cus i haven't configged it right yet. They said ot take off all settings and make it dhcp, nothig else. i did and it won't connect. weird.

im a little pissed they didn't say they would drop the speeds and since they didn't, i figure someone out there should be willing t file a class action lawsuite agains't ATT for lowering the speed and not the cost and not saying anything. i think that's wrong and illeagle to give you elss service and not say and not charge less.

[swizcore]

Im one of the lucky ones who haasent seen my service affected. Sorry for others though. I'd be chapped.

[mcasteel]

Originally posted by buggs1a
@home is now back for me. They migrated me.

Did ATT call you about the migration? I'm in Seattle too, but now without the service. I had a letter from ATT saying that they'd call when they did a migration.

[Krevinek]

Well, we signed up with AT&T near Seattle... 19.95/month for the first six months, no leasing fees during that for the modem. 34.95/month after that (we plan on buying a modem then, instead of continuing to lease and drive the price up 10/month).

We got a call this morning on how to re-activate our service, and the newspaper says the same thing. Pretty much the following: reboot machine/router/modem and see if the modem syncs up. Open a web browser and it will bring you to a page for full details. I cannot access the page since it is for AT&T Cable users only though.

The odd thing is... our installation isn't until the 5th, 3 days from now.

On the topic of the capping though, AT&T itself always capped to prevent the type of bullsh*t that helped kill Excite. Out of 4 million users, many were on places like Morpheus and creating 2-3GB of transfer a WEEK per USER. Excite was leaving it uncapped, trying to bank on the idea that people wouldn't saturate their bandwidth. What did people do? They saturated it and incurred millions of excess costs to Excite for bandwidth usage. AT&T and Excite would have had to work out a deal to raise the amount Excite got, or to raise prices to continue providing that type of bandwidth. Excite never capped, AT&T always did. The only lawsuit you could bring is that you were switched without notice or choice. Of course even that might have issues holding up in court considering what happened to Excite.

1.5Mbps/128Kbps for 35$ a month still beats out the DSL service in our area (which I am out of range of) at the same type of connection. The only hardwire connection provider is Qwest, which charges 35$/month, and then you tack on ISP charges... Earthlink is the only one willing to offer 1.5Mbps downstream over DSL, and they tack another 20$/month on top of the 35$/month. I'll take the capped Cable, thanks. It may be slower, but I can keep it saturated and be sure that I am not eating up others' bandwidth, or watching AT&T go down the tubes like Excite. It may take twice as long to grab than before with cable, but it sure beats my rather odd 56k modem: 34Kbps/64Kbps for uncompressable data (.zip, .mp3), 80Kbps/80Kbps for compressable data (.iso, text). Plus the upstream on cable doesn't completely prevent the downstream from working like it does with my modem connection.

[Johnstown]

All AT&T @Home users are now AT&T Broadband Internet users. They switched us over to essentially AT&T WorldNet over Cable. Excite@Home was just an ISP that got exclusive rights to AT&T's coax. (Like MSN or EarthLink over Verison DSL.) Some areas are still AT&T RoadRunner areas, and others are happy Cox@Home areas, too. Excite@Home just wanted to screw AT&T since AT&T tried to screw them. Now, if you didn't fool with your DHCP settings, rebooting your computer will grab you a new IP address and everything is the same. Their comment about automatically getting their new setup page assumes you didn't change your default browser webpage away from http://home.excite.com. (Nothing magical.) In general, I think this is a good thing. @Home customers have pissed off many webhosts and home.com has been blacklisted by several sites. Plus, like a previous poster said, not capping the downstream is somewhat unreasonable. I have friends in a certain area of Seattle whose connection is doggedly slow due to data over-saturation in their neighborhood. The only time I ever saw those blistering speeds was when I was pulling data from @Home's USENET server. Get over it. Things change, companies have to change the rules to stay profitable, or they go out of business. THat's life in a free market society. You can always swtich to DSL and be capped at .256 Mbit, instead of ATTBI's 1.5 Mbit.

[mcasteel]

Originally posted by Johnstown
[...] Now, if you didn't fool with your DHCP settings, rebooting your computer will grab you a new IP address and everything is the same.

Note to early TCI @Home Mac users (like me): early Mac users were assigned fixed IP addresses, since Apple had not yet implemented the ClientID option for DHCP.

If you are one of these users, you'll have to switch TCP/IP to use DHCP (instead of Manual) and dig out your TCI/@Home-assigned ClientID (the funny alphanumeric thing like C57456-A) so you can enter it in the DHCP settings. Then, you shouldn't even have to reboot. Just save the changes.