OT- @home working for you?

[Melson, Paul]

A lot of the same issues that caused problems for Northpoint, Rhythms
and other DSL carriers were in play w/ Excite@Home's chapter 11 filing.
They, too, were [too] aggressively seeking market share in lieu of
profit.  It's a risky strategy, but one that's been effective for other
companies (Amazon.com, for one) in their ramp-up phase.  To be honest,
I'll gladly pay another $20/mo for the same service, simply because it's
still cheaper (and faster) than the alternatives.  I remain optimistic
about cable offerings.  I mean, AT&T still owns the fiber junction at
the end of my block, putting them in better shape to deliver
high-bandwidth service to my door than anyone else.  

On a side note, the problem, IMHO, w/ fixed wireless is infrastructure.
It doesn't exist so there are relatively huge start-up costs making it
practical only in larger urban areas where you can reach a higher
density of customers with the same number of towers/antennae.  Of
course, in these same areas the telco infrastructure is already in place
making it cheaper to go w/ DSL, ISDN, or cable.  Wireless also suffers
(perhaps even moreso) from the same band saturation problems that make
cable modems less attractive than DSL.  It's awesome if you're the first
customer, but once the 40th gets on your tower, latency and bandwidth
during peak usage are comparable (perhaps even worse than) async modem
connections.


-----Original Message-----
From: Travis Austin [mailto:travisa_19@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 10:05 PM
To: linux-user@egr.msu.edu
Subject: RE: OT- @home working for you?


I kinda knew that cable modems were going to be too good to be true...
It seems that they are really figuring that they cannot charge what they
are for the service.  I bet you their new offering adds 20 to 30 dollars
to the price of their service...  I was kinda hoping that Fixed Wireless
Broadband would take over more than it has!!

Travis