Cox dropping At Home

[David P. Schwartz]

My brother lives in Connecticut and had @Home service through his local cable provider for a while, and they don't have Cox back there.
(He dropped the service because he said he got really poor performance.)

Have you heard that if you get a Qwest account now, your ISP is going to be MSN (unless you want to pay more for someone else)?  I'd
imagine that @Home is an ISP, just like MSN, for rent to the highest bidder (or cheapest backbone provider).

The way I look at it, this business is like any other transportation business.  Boeing may make the planes, but they don't operate any
airlines.  USSteel makes the rails, but they don't run any railroads.  The folks who run the wires and optical cables (Corning Glass
makes the lion's share of optical fiber) aren't ISPs.  The telcos and cable companies, among others, buy the fiber and create backbones
from it.  Somebody else lays a service on it.

There was something on a news show a night or two ago that said enough fiber optic cables have been laid over the past five years to
circle the globe 1500 times!  Most of the companies who paid to lay the cable are either bankrupt or nearly so.  It seems they overbuilt
and aren't able to find enough customers to pay the freight today; rather than drop their prices, they end up going belly-up.  Which
means that in a year or so we might see T1 connections into the home for what we're paying for DSL today.  That is, unless the big phone
and cable companies (or some guy named Gates) don't end up buying up all the lines in bankruptcy auctions.

-David

Nathan England wrote:

> I just read an article on the NYTime site about Cox and Comcast may drop
> the At Home internet service.
> I was under the assumption that @Home was owned by cox and they
> controlled all the servers.
> So now I'm quite confused.  What exactley does cox do? They provide
> cable tv and what?  No internet services?
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/01/technology/01WEB.html
>
> Can someone explain this to me?
>
> nathan