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Things you should know about
Rogers @Home cable modem Internet Service Provider (ISP)

First written Feb.6/99   Please see new note part way down about EXTREMELY POOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT. If you wish to read the 2:10 minute CTV National News piece from Goldhawk on the @Home services that aired across Canada April 22 at 11:25pm, go to http://www.goldhawk.com/consumer/19990422.shtml

UPDATE Feb. 1/2002: In the late summer early fall of 2001 the @Home network that subcontracts internet servers & backbone connections, indicated they were having financial problems. Many cable companies (including Shaw & Cogico) did the responsible thing by immediately starting to make plans to get their client base of cable modem users switched over to their own servers & internet backbone connection, however Rogers did nothing at first. Later in the fall when the @Home network filed for bankruptcy protection, Rogers had to push the panic button to try & get all 442,000 of it's cable modem users to switch over their email address & web sites to the new Rogers servers by the end of November. Fortunately the courts allowed @Home to stay in operation a little longer & Rogers negotiated an addition 2 month coverage with @Home to help easy the transition period. Unfortunately far too many people found Rogers inaccurate & incomplete instructions too difficult & were not able to easily switch over, so many of them simply canceled their Rogers account & went with Bell Sympatico's high speed DSL or some other DSL internet provider. I never was successful in switching the web sites over because Rogers new web server wasn't even working at first & then when it was, it wasn't compatible with my Cute FTP version 2.6 (1998) upload software. What really astonishes me is that Rogers (& presumable many other cable companies), never considered the fact that their subcontract relationship with @Home might not last forever (duh) (what business relationship does last very long these days?) and they did not negotiate ownership rights to the parcel of domain names they were given so that they would not have to switch everybody over to new email addresses. Talk about a major blunder. Rogers had about 442,000 clients & each of them had up to 7 email addresses. Can you imagine the headache & cost to Rogers of having to convert up to 3 million email addresses over? Since Rogers really shot themselves in the foot this time, I'm not surprised that nearly everyone I knew that was on Rogers cable modem, considered this the last straw & switched to another ISP. I had been with Roger cable modem for 3.5 years & consistently had problems a minimum of a couple times every week during that 3.5 years. Meanwhile I would be getting emails from Rogers apologizing for the bad service & indicating improvements were in the works. I hope Rogers learns their lesson that incompetence, bad service that insults clients, not planning ahead & broken promises wear a little thin after awhile & hope for better service does not spring forth externally, especially when there is viable competition to switch to.

@HOME: @Home is an organization based near San Francisco California. Many North American cable companies subcontract with @Home for the email & web servers & internet connection part of the service. Unfortunately these cable companies weren't very wise because they never seriously considered what would happen if they parted company with the @Home people. Indeed in the early fall of 2001 Incite who owns @Home indicated they were having financial troubles. Several cable companies immediately started to make plans, but Rogers Cable did nothing until later in the fall when Incite @Home actually filed for bankruptcy. Not only did this mean that Rogers had to scramble to install their own servers, but it meant that they had the monumental headache of switching 442,000 customers over to new email addresses in a very short period of time & each one of those customers could have up to 7 email addresses (potential over 3 million email address changes). Now what really boggles my mind is how all these cable companies could issue email addresses for a domain name (@home.com) that they didn't even own or have control over once the @Home company went bust. In my view that is monumentally irresponsible to not take measures to ensure continuity of a domain name. The switchover to new email addresses has caused major headaches for these cable companies & they deserve what they got. It's pretty clear that these cable companies didn't plan ahead on behalf of their customers, so if their customers leave & go elsewhere for their internet service, the cable companies will have nobody else but themselves to blame, though I'm sure they'll try to shift the blame.

THEORETICAL CONNECTION SPEEDS: The @Home network offers it's services through local cable companies throughout North America (currently 16 are signed up). It offers bi-directional internet access via the same cable you get your television service from. In most areas it is the only really fast inexpensive internet access available since Bell seems to have had troubles rolling out their ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) internet service in most areas. In our area @Home offers up to 3000 kilobits/second (375 kilobytes/second) for downloads & browsing (that's 53 times faster than a 56.6 telephone modem in theory) & up to 400 kilobits/second (50 kilobytes/second) for uploads (that's 7 times faster than a 56.6 telephone modem in theory). It seldom comes anywhere close to those speeds for download but I have achieved up to 98% of those speeds when doing direct transfers in an upload mode. The service is currently aimed at home consumers who want really fast internet surfing so @Home has purposely throttled back on the upload speeds because they don't want users & businesses using the service as a substitute for an expensive T1 connection (which would bottleneck the bandwidth of the system). I'm told that the actual cable modems are capable of up to around 10,000 kilobits/second (1250 kilobytes/second) in both directions but their servers aren't yet able to handle that (the servers can't even handle the current bandwidth properly).

ROGERS CABLE MODEM IS A CONSUMER SERVICE: Initially the @Home service seems like a dream come true especially for a small business like mine that operates out of a home & needs fast internet speeds, but there are some serious issues to be concerned about. The cable companies are wisely pointing out that the @Home service is aimed at consumers & that they eventually plan to offer an enhanced version for businesses called @Work (now available), once they get the bugs & kinks worked out of the @Home service. I've been using the @Home service since Sept 17/98 & it's quite clear by the extremely poor service much of the last few months that the cable companies have not got the bugs worked out yet. Even throughout 2000 & 2001 there have been frequent email server problems. It's been my experience that many home consumers of internet services aren't very aware of when their internet service provider is giving them problems, but businesses sure know it when the system is down or very slow for several hours or days at a time & they hear reports of incoming email bouncing.

COSTS & COMPETITION: My local cable company is called Rogers & they charge $44.95 Canadian (about $28 American) per month plus taxes for the @Home connection (add $10. to that cost if you don't also subscribe to their cable TV service). There is a $150 Canadian (about $97.50 American) charge for installation which includes a PCI or ISA Ethernet card in your computer, a 2 way passive cable splitter, a new run of cable to your computer & software. Sometimes the cable companies offer special installation discounts at certain times (like $100. off or free during certain dates), or you can save a little money by doing the installation yourself (but you better really know lots about networking). As an inducement to sign up, Rogers currently waives the cable modem rental charge of $15.05 Canadian (about $9.78 American) for the first six months. After that period, assuming there are cable modems available on the market to purchase, they say they will start charging rental or you can buy your own. There is some doubt whether Rogers will actually start charging for the cable modem rental as Shaw Cable & perhaps some other @Home cable companies in the USA are already including the cable modem in the $44.95 monthly connection fee. To date (Dec 2001) Rogers has not charged the cable modem rental fee. Cable companies have a monopoly in their designated areas so there is no guarantee that one cable company will follow the market practices of the others. If Bell ever does get their ADSL high speed internet access up & rolling in most areas, then the cable companies will have some stiff competition especially when they subcontract the DSL connection through your existing telephone dial up internet service provider (no need to change your email address).

INSTANTLY & PERMANENTLY CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET (YA RIGHT): Cable companies are advertising that unlike a telephone modem internet service provider which requires a dial up connection & ties up your phone line, a cable modem is constantly connected to the internet (as long as your computer is turned on). While that may be true, the bottleneck seems to be the @Home mail & browsing servers (especially the mail server). Many times I've had to wait for a server connection longer than it would have taken me to logon via a telephone connection. I thought I was going to be able to dump my telephone modem ISP & the extra telephone line I was paying for once I got onto this new cable modem service, but the service has been so unreliable that I am currently forced to maintain my old & my new ISP's just to be able to stay connected for my business. I've had more reports of clients email to me bouncing in the last few months than I did in the last few years with Execulink. Bounced email because of a downed server is bad enough, but trashed email is completely inexcusable in my opinion. If an incoming mail server is down for whatever reason, the email should be diverted to another holding server pending the return to service of the main server, rather than bounce email back to the sender as undeliverable or just trashing it (throwing it away or deleting it). How would you feel about the post office if they returned all your snail mail to the sender & marked it as undeliverable on days when your local mailman was sick, or the substitute mailman just threw the mail in the garbage because he couldn't get it done on his shift? Think about it, because that's exactly what the Rogers @Home email server does with your email on occasion when their email server is down. I've already lost some business because someone sent me an email but it didn't get through.

EMAIL ATTACHMENT SIZE: My old telephone modem ISP (Execulink), as bad & as slow as they are, has no size limitation on file attachments to email (recently they implemented a 20 MB per email limitation). @Home says they have a 5 megabyte attachment limitation & they claim that email was never designed for large attachments (funny that other much slower ISPs can handle large attachments). The real kicker is that the @Home servers inaccurately measure file sizes 34 - 37% larger than they really are. That means that you can really only send or receive an email of around 3.65 - 3.73 megabytes before it will bounce back to the sender. I have gotten Rogers @Home technical support to verify that they are seeing the same exaggerated file sizes, but they won't pass that information along to the people who could correct this (apparently it's not there job). I think it's pretty sad when an ISP that has as fast a connection to the internet as this one does, limits attachments to a meager 5 megabytes & then misjudges the size so you can really only send or receive attachment up to about 3.65 megabytes. @Home also will only hold up to 10 megabytes of incoming email (& attachments) in each mailbox before they start bouncing the email, so if you get a lot of email or large attachments, you better be prepared to have someone come in & download your email while you're on vacation or download it from another ISP using the NetMail feature. Incidentally, the Bell Sympatico high speed DSL internet package also has a size limitation on outgoing email, but it's 104 megabytes (28 times larger than @home's size limitation).

WEB SITE SIZE & SPEED: Rogers includes 7 emails accounts, each with a 10 megabyte web site. So I hoped this meant that maybe I could combine my seven 10 meg sites into one big site of 70 megabytes which would either allow me to put large downloadable files there or create an FTP site where I could temporarily place a large 15 megabyte AVI file & such for my clients to download. No such luck, they won't let you combine your sites. What's more, lately I sometimes haven't been able to even upload to my own site because the @Home servers weren't working right. I would get a message that says “Can't close data transfer gracefully”. Furthermore, the download speeds for a 4.7 megabyte file on an @Home server have been at certain times unbearably slow (often 12 KB/sec or slower plus stalls) & often the download terminates before it's finished downloading. The web speeds certainly aren't what I would expect from a high speed internet service provider & often are not fast enough to play a quality movie off an @Home server.  I've found that other ISP's sites for file downloads are usually far faster than Rogers own @Home web server site. So much for blazingly fast internet access. If you want to trace each server & their time delay in the chain between you & a web site to find out where the problem is, open up a dos prompt (command prompt in Windows NT) & type tracert www.siteyouwant.com then hit enter (there is a space after tracert & you should type in the site you are tracing to).

EMAIL SERVERS UPDATED ON A WEEKDAY: Rogers @Home will intentionally take their email server down in the middle of a busy weekday day for routine upgrades & they don't tell you ahead of time when the server will be down. When I complained & asked why they didn't do routine upgrades in the wee hours of the morning or on weekends, customer support stated that this isn't a business service (implying that consumers don't care or it doesn't matter to them). As far as I'm concerned, they're charging enough for this service that it is reasonable to assume that a lot of small businesses will be using it for business email on weekdays. Besides, even home consumers deserve better than to have the email server taken down for a few hours in the middle of a business day. It's bad enough when the mail server goes down in the middle of a weekday because of unexpected technical problems, but to purposely take it off line for routine upgrades in the middle of a weekday is unacceptable. Clearly Rogers & @Home aren't the least bit interested in trying to minimize the problems & downtime for their customers.

CACHING & WEAK LINKS IN YOUR BROWSING SPEED: Your internet browsing is only as fast as the slowest link. If the server on the other end or the relay hop servers in between are slow, it doesn't matter how fast your connection is, you'll only be downloading at a fraction of the speed. Rogers says they try to bypass some of this by caching some of the most common internet sites on their local servers to speed things up. I've been to a lot of popular sites that receive tens of thousands of visitors per day & seldom do they seem any faster, so this local caching idea doesn't seem to be working as planned. In fact, I just discovered that when I update my Execulink web site (not an @Home site), I don't notice the updates right away when browsing with my cable modem internet connection because the @Home server is caching my Execulink site & it shows yesterdays web sight and not the new information I just updated. So this caching concept certainly isn't working as planned & is actually creating new problems because it doesn't update right away.

NO DOMAIN NAMES: Nearly all telephone modem ISPs offer the option of purchasing a Domain Name (i.e. www.YourCompany.com) even for consumers, though mostly it is businesses who would want a domain name. The @Home service does not offer domain names even though it would be very easy for them to do so because each account usually keeps the same static IP address (recently switch to dynamic IP addresses). Presumably when they finally get their @Work service up & running they will offer domain names, but at a huge increase in price. Bell Sympatico's high speed consumer DSL connection also doesn't offer domain names but their business DSL connection (at $79.) does. Some local Internet Service Providers now offer DSL connections & domain names.

WEB SITE NAMES TOO COMPLEX: Web site names are unnecessarily complex. For example my old company site (no longer valid) is http://members.home.net/impacttelevideo when it could have been simplified to http://home.com/impacttelevideo

CHOOSE YOUR MAIN EMAIL NAME CAREFULLY: Rogers & presumably the other @Home cable companies have a third party company do all the telephone sign ups. Apparently this other company uses different computer software which forces you to chose your Primary user email name with up to around 6 or 8 characters maximum (quite limiting). Afterwards once your cable modem service is up & running, you can go on line & choose the other 6 email names, but now they can be 3 - 32 characters. Rogers doesn't tell you how difficult it can be to change your Primary account name later on. They originally told me I might have to do without my cable modem service for several days while they got around to changing my Primary user name. If you sign up, choose your Primary user name carefully because it's not as easy to change it afterwards as it is to change the other account names. Insist that they allow you to use as many characters as you do for the other accounts. By the way, although @Home services tells you that your email address must be lower case (i.e. doug.hembruff@home.com) the server is really not case sensitive for incoming email, so people can email you using a combination of upper & lower cases (i.e. Doug.Hembruff@home.com)

NO DIAL UP CONNECTION WHEN TRAVELING: If you're traveling, you cannot access your @Home email from your laptop with a dial up telephone connection to the @Home network. You can only remotely access your email if you also have paid for a standard telephone modem ISP using a feature called NetMail. I would have thought that the @Home people would have at least provided for a dialup connection (even if it was a long distance call) to retrieve your email when traveling, rather than having to maintain another ISP. They do now have a Remote Access box they'll sell you for $14.95, but every time you use it to retrieve email or browse, you pay $0.25 per minute of connection time. In contrast, Bell Sympatico's new (A)DSL internet service does include up to 10 hours a month of dialup connection when you are away from home with your laptop & they have local toll-free numbers for every major city in Canada.

ASK FOR A CREDIT OR REFUND: In order to encourage Rogers @Home to get their act together, whenever there is a serious service disruption or slowdown, I try to phone their customer support line, find out what the problem is & if appropriate I demand a credit on my bill. If we all did that, Rogers & the @Home people would soon get their act together or suffer serious loss of revenue. Lately however Rogers has been unwilling to give a credit saying that I didn't phone in each & every time their was a disruption or slowdown (they are usually willing to acknowledge that there was a problem though). When I try to phone in during serious problem times I get a message that says the wait to speak to a service person is currently up to 45 minutes (now that's service for you). If you decide to sign up for the @home service, you'll have to keep after them on a regular basis, or just put up with intermittent service. By the way, on more than one occasion now Rogers has promised me credits that they didn't deliver on until I followed up to remind them what they promised. I get the feeling that they tell you what you want to hear and then leave it up to you to catch them. Throughout 2000 there have been numerous service interruptions that I have emailed them about & asked for a refund. Most of those messages go completely unanswered.

A cable modem account can be wonderful & very fast when it's working properly, but very frustrating when it isn't working right. Perhaps in time, many of the current startup problems & rapid expansion problems of the @Home cable modem system will be ironed out. Expansion has been so rapid that Rogers claims to already have 50,000 users signed up as of Jan. 99 (Broadcaster magazine in Dec 99 claims 386,000 Rogers @Home users). News papers in the fall of 2001 claim 442,000 customers. By contrast, Broadcaster magazine claims that Bell has only signed up about 30,000 ADSL users. In the mean time, shop wisely & let your cable company know what you expect in an Internet Service Provider. If they have a money back guarantee time period (say 2 months or so) where you can get a full refund if you're not happy with the service & wish to drop it, don't be afraid to take advantage of it (you'll be sending a clear message to them). So far they just don't seem to get it & I've lost count of the numerous times the email servers have been down or extremely slow. You can read up on Rogers @Home service at http://www.shoprogers.com/ 

ALTERNATIVES TO CABLE MODEM: If you need a faster internet connection than a telephone modem can give you, you should check the Canadian RESIDENTIAL Bell web site at www.bell.sympatico.ca/speedup or BUSINESS at http://www.bell.ca/adsl or at  http://www.bell.ca/adsl/frameset4.asp (A)DSL is usually about 960 kilobits/second (or 120 kilobytes/second) for downloads & browsing (which is 17 times faster than a dial-up modem), (compared to cable modems 3000 kilobits or 375 kilobytes/second)(about 53 times faster than a dial-up connection). However (A)DSL's upload speed is usually only about 120 kilobits/second (or 15 kilobytes/second)(twice as fast a dial-up), (compared to cable modems 400 kilobits/second or 50 kilobytes/second for uploads)(7 times as fast as dial-up). The DSL upload speeds are quite disappointing (120 kbps) being only slightly more than twice that of a dial-up modem (56 kbps), but most people use downloading & browsing much more & that is approximately 17 times faster than a dial-up modem. Despite (A)DSL being approximately 1/3 the speed of cable modem, in reality it might actually be faster than cable modem much of the time because (A)DSL uses a dedicated line (not shared bandwidth like cable modem), or so we are told in the Sympatico advertising and (A)DSL uses a secure connection (though nothing is secure without a good firewall) & because Bell's DSL connection seems to go through less server hops than Rogers. Even a good 56.6 telephone modem through a good ISP would sometimes be better than Rogers @Home cable modem which doesn't work well too much of the time & sometimes trashes your in/out email (though you seldom know that it has been trashed). Bell Sympatico's high speed DSL internet plan is about the same price as cable modem, but it comes with 6 email address (not 7) & it only comes with 1 web site of 5 MB (upgradeable to 12 MB at no additional charge) (whereas cable is 7 web sites of 10MB each).

FALSE & MISLEADING ADVERTISING: I have felt for a long time that some of Roger's advertisements smacked of false or misleading advertising, but recently (Nov. 99) I've notice a Rogers television ad that had outright lies in it. The same ad appeared in a 3/4 page spread in our local newspaper on Dec. 4/99. The ad reads "So what's the deal with these phone guys? Now they're tellin' us phone lines are a fast way to download stuff from the Net? Are they trying to bamboozle us? The Internet on Cable is way faster than even the fastest, most expensive telephone access. And cable is still up to a hundred times faster than a regular phone line. And that's the straight goods, isn't it guys? See these eyes? You can't pull the wool over them."  Apparently Rogers doesn't want to acknowledge to the public that the telephone company has been rolling out their (A)DSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) internet service using "a regular phone line", which in theory is almost as fast as the @Home cable modem access & in real world usage is often faster because (A)DSL doesn't have to share the bandwidth with your neighbor during busy times of the day. When Rogers claims that "And cable is still up to a hundred times faster than a regular phone line" they are comparing against the old obsolete analogue 28.8 modems sold several years ago, not the newer 56.6 modems that have become the only speed dial-up modem you can purchase in the last few years, and they certainly aren't comparing against the newest (A)DSL digital modems that use regular phone lines. So folks, it's Rogers who is trying to "Bamboozle" you, not the phone company. I abhor such intentional misinformation. To be fair, Bell Sympatico isn't much more honest in their advertising (i.e. "I bought the neighborhood so I didn't have to share the cable modem connection" advertising campaign). Too bad these two companies don't concentrate on advertising their real strengths rather than lies & perceptions.

ANYONE CAN CANCEL YOUR ACCOUNT: Rogers does not have a proof of identity policy, so anyone who knows your name, home phone number & street address can call Rogers, pretend they are you & cancel your service. It happened to me. Rogers puts the onus on you to provide them with a password or other proof of identity information so an imposter can't mess with your account.

ACCESS USING MORE THAN ONE COMPUTER: Rogers now offers an additional IP address for $9.95 per month per extra computer (maximum 2 additional computers), for those computers in your home that are already networked together. Alternatively, you could avoid paying Rogers an additional amount for each computer by purchasing internet sharing software such as WinProxy (about $79.99 Canadian for 3 networked computers) by Ositis http://www.ositis.com Not only will this save you money in the long run, but it provides you with the additional benefit of a secure firewall. Alternatively you could use a router/switcher port (hub) combination such as http://www.linksys.com for about $130. CDN which acts as a hardware firewall & lets you share files between your home computers. Most cable modem users aren't aware that if you have file sharing turned on for networking between your computers, without a firewall or password, other cable modem users in your neighborhood may be able to look in on your computer files. If you want a firewall only (without internet sharing software) you can get ZoneAlarm 2.1 at http://www.zonelabs.com/   which is free for personal and non-commercial use & $20. U.S. for businesses.

By Doug Hembruff.
Some parts last updated Feb. 2 2002

 

NOTE ON EXTREMELY POOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT: I'm writing this update paragraph on March 28/99. My Rogers @Home cable modem has been completely out of service for exactly ONE WHOLE WEEK as of today & Rogers has done little to even attempt to get it working right. Every day now for a week I've email them at least 3 times a day at support@rogers.home.net using my other ISP, but all I get back are automated replies saying they've received my message. Rogers phone support line at 1 888 288-4663 has been busy for much of the week & when I was able to get the recording it always said the average wait time would be very long (up to 100 minutes on hold). Three times I waited & it took 32 minutes on hold the first time, 72 minutes the second time & 46 minutes to get through to a person the third time. The tech support person the first time seemed completely incompetent at being able to help. The second time I talked to Collin (employee 6813) who seemed more competent, but still wasn't able to help. I tried the things he suggested but we could find no problem with my system. He phoned back once as promised, but didn't phone again as promised & just left me hanging without an answer. At the beginning of the fourth day of no service, about all the comfort he could offer was that my name was in the Queue for someone to look after me, but that Rogers was having such severe problems all over the province that they were taking much longer than normal to get around to people. It's now 7 days without service & nobody has phoned & nobody has come out to see if they can fix the problem (I'm just left hanging). Today I talked to Tony (employee 8532) who apparently has his job performance graded by how long he takes to solve a problem & after 1:25 hours, he wouldn't talk to me any more because he had spent too much time on the phone with me. We still had a driver to install but he passed me off to Adam (employee 8537) who tried to help but couldn't (& I had to explain everything all over again for the forth time). All service technicians have refused to provide me with an email where I could follow up with them without going through the convoluted process of waiting on hold for a hour. Few have phone me back like they promised & all were too willing to point the finger at the Ethernet card as the problem but weren't willing to support it even though they sold it to me. Apparently Roger absolves themselves of support after one week, for the Ethernet card they sell you in the installation kit. They don't even keep any spare Ethernet cards in stock so I could drive to the local Rogers outlet & swap cards. Every diagnostic we did indicated that the Ethernet card was working properly, but it was convenient to blame the problem on that. They said I must contact the manufacture of the Ethernet card (SMC) who could help me diagnose it & would ship me a new one in several days if it was defective. I've spent 16 years as a technician & I can spot when people are poor diagnosticians & when they're passing the buck. Rogers customer support absolutely refused to send a service technician out to determine if the problem was their cable modem or the Ethernet card they sold me. They basically dumped the problem back in my lap (several times). So much for customer support & the problem is still not solved. Virtually everyone I know in town who has had a Rogers @Home cable modem account for awhile is having major problems & REALLY dissatisfied with the service. I SIMPLY CANNOT RECOMMEND ANYONE SUBSCRIBING TO THE ROGERS @Home CABLE MODEM SERVICE AT THIS TIME. IT GETS A DISTINCT TWO THUMBS DOWN FROM ME. If anyone knows of a way to stop Rogers from advertising what they can't deliver, or knows of a class action law suite against Rogers, or knows of a government agency that can stop these people, please let me know as I am determined to let Rogers know in no uncertain terms that their behavior & false advertising is unacceptable.

April 9 follow up, finally after 11 days of being without my cable modem, I got it working (no thanks to Rogers or the @Home people).

April 28 follow up. Last week on Thursday April 22 at 11:25pm the CTV National News aired a 2:10 minute piece right across Canada on the problems that customers of Rogers & @Home are facing. I was the person who alerted them to this problem. If you missed it, you can read the text at http://www.goldhawk.com/consumer/19990422.shtml

 

 

A friend of mine forwarded the following compilation of information he received about the poor performance that @Home cable modem customers have been receiving across North America. You might find this very interesting reading & it might change your mind about getting a cable modem at this point in time.

TRYING TO CALL, BUT NO ONE'S ATHOME

Nothing about the Internet is generating more interest these days—or attracting more new capital—than the red hot business of distributing interactive programming and Web content over coaxial and fiber optic cable. Vastly more data can be moved in this way than over conventional telephone lines. Yet anyone who thinks that the marketing of Internet services via cable systems is a cake-walk had better take a look at the ongoing experience of AtHome Corp., the leader in the field.

Corporate giants like Microsoft Corp.—which is a partner in the joint venture that operates MSNBC—and AT&T have been paying multibillion-dollar sums to get into the “hgh banidwidth” business. The preferred route: Acquire a cable operator that already has a large installed customer base, then use that cable network to market Internet connections to what amounts to a captive audience.

AtHome is the company that actually puts cable companies into the Net access business. In the last year, AtHome‘s stock has been a Wall Street darling, soaring by more than 350 percent on investor hopes for a big future payoff on an investment that already tops $780 million.

But AtHome’s surging stock price has been spurred by an ultra-fast-growth business plan that depends on adding new subscribers to the company’s so-called “cable modem” Internet service at an annualized 200 percent-plus growth rate, quarter after quarter. Company officials say that, at latest count, the AtHome service has roughly 310,000 subscribers, and that they expect the growth trend to continue. Yet this very growth rate is now creating increasingly troublesome technical and customer service issues for the four-year-old company. And though the company says it is working hard to address them, there is emerging evidence—albeit anecdotal in nature—that the problems are not going away.

In Fremont, Calif., last week, angry members of the city council ordered the local cable operator, Tele-Communications Inc., and AtHome to sit down with city officials and agree to a written set of minimally acceptable customer service standards for Fremont residents who call up complaining of poor and unreliable service. The problems arose after AtHome’s network crashed before Christmas and wasn’t brought back online in Fremont for weeks—during which time the cable company left subscribers in the dark as to what was wrong or when it would be fixed. “You folks just need to answer your telephones,” scolded one city council member as he lectured company officials on proper treatment of their customers.

Meanwhile, a story in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper pulled together a growing chorus of service complaints from AtHome subscribers not just in Fremont but in cities from Portland, Ore., to Nashville, Tenn., Birmingham, Ala. and elsewhere. The common gripe: it is becoming increasingly difficult to connect to the service, and once connected, online page-loading and surfing often turns out to be slower than what is possible via conventional Internet connection services. Worst of all, cable operators and AtHome rarely provide helpful support in fixing the problems, and will sometimes ignore complaints outright.

A kind of Internet clearing house has even sprung up for complaints at http://members.home.net/badservice/   The page carries a long and daily-lengthening thread of kvetches and complaints from disgruntled AtHome subscribers. ‘What a joke. Nobody can solve my problem and I’ve been working with them for 3 months. Service is erratic…My 33.6 modem was faster and more reliable.’ from an ILLINOIS CUSTOMER. From a Fort Worth, Texas, subscriber comes this: “My service has been down twice since I subscribed 7 days ago. Once for just a few hours, once for almost 48 hours. The tech I talked to said there was no estimate on when it would be back up. He then connected me with a customer service answering machine. I left a professional, businesslike message. No return call. I sent an e-mail to AtHome regarding my service problems so far. No answer.”

And this from an Ontario, Canada, subscriber: “Today I wake up, I have to get my e-mail before I go to work, and of course the mail server isn’t working. About 10 minutes later my connection dies completely. I call tech support and am left on hold for 2 hours. After explaining my problem they say well it should be fixed anywhere from 2 to 24 hours from now.” And this from an Illinois customer: “What a joke. Nobody can solve my problem and I’ve been working with them for 3 months. My service is erratic. I see 100 percent packet loss about 30 percent of the time. My 33.6 modem was faster and more reliable.” And finally, from Tennessee: “AtHome is by far the worst organization I’ve ever dealt with. My 2nd month with AtHome, cumulative downtime for that month was 1.5 weeks. They offered no credit to my acct, so I asked and got $3.24. Speed is variable to the point of insult.”

Do you have experience with AtHome or another high-speed Net provider? Tell your tale on the Byron BBS http://bbs.msnbc.com/bbs/msnbc-byron/index.asp These complaints all echo similar frustrations that I myself, as an AtHome user, have experienced with the service since subscribing to it through Cablevision of Connecticut in September of 1998: erratic and unreliable connections, molasses-slow surfing speeds thereafter—and a continuing inability of technicians or engineers, either at Cablevision or AtHome, to diagnose and fix the problem.

AtHome officials say their own in-house customer surveys show a high degree of satisfaction with the service, and that most of the problems trace to temporary glitches that inevitably develop when the company launches its service on a new cable system. The company promised to provide a copy of its survey questionnaire for this story, but at deadline had failed to supply it. The company’s claims about the temporary nature of performance problems are simply not supported by the public statements of customers. Many complaining users say they’ve been experiencing poor performance for months and that the company has been unable to remedy the problem.

’The system always slows down a lot in the evenings, ” says Tracey Barrett of New Canaan, Conn., ’and many times I haven’t been able to get logged on at all. But when they send tech people to investigate, they always arrive during the day, when everything is working normally, and they go away saying nothing’s wrong.”

Many of AtHome’s difficulties may ultimately trace to the sheer Space Program complexity of its cable modem network, which depends on the smooth interaction of a vast system of cable company nodes, head-ends, fiber and coaxial wires—all feeding into and out of not just other networks but the entire Internet itself—a setup that seems to baffle even many engineers and Internet professionals.

Thus, a Milwaukee, Wis.-based online stock quotes provider—Paragon Software Inc.—says it has lately received more than 200 furious complaints from customers, many who access the service via AtHome. The gripes all concern slow data speeds for the receipt of the stock price data. But, says Jennifer Bonano of Paragon, ’our engineers traced the problem to a router being used by AtHome in the Chicago area.” AtHome officials retort that the router in question is in fact not used by AtHome at all, and that the problem must thus lie elsewhere. Be that as it may, the data is simply not getting through to Paragon Software customers trying to receive it via AtHome cable modems and, once again, it would seem no one can say why.

Aaron Williams, a Fremont, Calif., software engineer who writes code for so-called router-accelerators, says that AtHome simply does not have adequate bandwidth to support the traffic it is bringing on line. ’When I first became a subscriber two and one-half years ago none of these problems existed, and the service worked like a dream,” says Williams. ’Now the network is overloaded and everything is running slower and slower.”

The real long-term problem for AtHome is, of course, the public relations damage that could flow from the situation. The AtHome cable modem service is not cheap—costing $40 or more per month on many cable systems. In times of prosperity, when the economy is booming, people may be willing to tolerate uncertain service as a trade-off for the ultra-swift Web experience that cable modems bring when the network is actually functioning properly. As a backstop against cable modem down-times, customers may even be willing to maintain contracts with their existing Internet service providers’ “just in case.” But that kind of free spending is certainly not going to last if the economy weakens. And were that to happen, it is easy enough to imagine which service would get terminated by a subscriber if the choice were to come down to (a) a fast and sometimes unreliable service at a gold-plated price, or (b) a slower but more reliable provider at a much lower cost.

In that regard, AtHome’s biggest challenge may well come down to preventing its customer complaints from getting any louder. But that too may be difficult. Company officials point to data that shows a tripling of subscriber rolls since June of 1998, accompanied by a 50 percent decline in the percentage of customers who file complaints regarding service. But in absolute terms, that means the total number of disgruntled customers has actually risen. In other words, the percentage decline in complaining voices may look good on paper, but in reality—because of the trebled base—it amounts to an ever growing chorus of disgruntled and angry customers.

What’s more, most of the customer growth has come in just the last couple of months as the service and support situation has worsened—which simply means that large numbers of customers may only now be growing frustrated enough to begin vocally complaining. The situation appears to be straining relations between AtHome and at least one major cable system operator: Cablevision Systems Inc. of Woodbury, Long Island, N.Y. One top official in Cablevision last week said, ’We are in discussions with AtHome to see that they meet some minimal standards of support. Otherwise we may cease providing the service.”

Losing Cablevision would of course be a public relations disaster for AtHome. And Cablevision hardly dampened speculation when a company spokesman declined to say anything about the matter beyond a carefully worded statement, saying, “We are not pleased if any of our customers are not happy. We are working with AtHome to address these customer issues.” Officials at AtHome confirmed that such talks were underway and included a meeting with Cablevision officials in New York last week. But Robert Tomassi, AtHome’s senior vice president of operations, characterized the talks as routine and similar to those that AtHome has been having with other cable operators as well.

Whatever the impetus for the meetings, AtHome investors had better hope they lead quickly to greatly improved service—and customer support to go with it—or this currently high-flying Internet stock may soon be returning to earth. After all, on the Internet as anywhere else, getting a customer is only half the battle. After that you’ve got to keep him.

By Doug Hembruff.

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