I imagine lots of SDMB cable internet users are in the same boat as myself as Excite@home service users. The judge says it all goes off at midnight sans an agreement. It’ll be an interesting time tonight.
Comcast@home user here, and it will indeed be an interesting night. From various stories around the net, I have gathered that a worse case scenario would be a few week outage, but I would dearly hate to go back to a dialup for even that short a time.
Cutting off almost half the broadband users in the US would not be a Good Thing, and I think most of the players involved know that. I am fairly confident the creditors and AT&T will reach some sort of agreement.
<fingers crossed>
The ruling only says that it may be shut down at midnight. I doubt if it’s in anyone’s best interest to alienate a huge base of customers so there is some home for service staying on or being restored.
Still, glad I have netzero loaded and a Yahoo email address
“Cutting off almost half the broadband users in the US”
That many? Hmmmm.
Those intersting files I like to get I won’t be able to…if no one uploads. well, I always thought satellite modems were a nice deal.
Well, i admit that “half” was a bit too high. There are so many different estimates for broadband usage, it’s hard to get a handle on it. (residential, or business, or both,
etc).
I do know that roughly four million users are involved in the outcome of this ruling.
Apologies.
Slight hijack-
I live in British Columbia, where @home was recently bought out by Shaw Cable. They gave everyone two weeks notice to change their email address, because they wanted to distance themselves from @home’s financial troubles rather than pick up the home.ca domain-name cheap. F*ckers. How many people have to change resumes, business cards, inform all their contacts of changed address, etc? The @home domain name at least was easy to remember. They wanted to saddle me with ltaylor239@shaw.ca or some similarly crappy address. Well, this is becoming more than a slight hijack so I’ll just go froth at the mouth in the corner.
It’s 13 after midnight here on the East Coast, and Comcast@Home is still churning.
I think we’re in the clear.
I hope.
Still on here in Albuquerque…Comcast
I think that it is Midnight Pacific time- so still 2 hours…
If I get cut off I’ll be upset-
it just seems wrong.
I just found out yesterday.
ATT@home here…
If @home ceases service, all I have to to is reboot, and the network that ATT put together will kick in, and I will still be good to go…
At least that is how it is supposed to work.
I will have to change e-mail addresses though sighs
Color me clueless…What’s going on??
I’m a comcast@home user, and I haven’t heard a thing.
excite@home, the company that is the internet service provider for you filed for Bankruptcy in September (they contract with comcast to be the ISP). They are apparently losing money hand over fist and got permission from a judge today to stop providing service to comcast, Cox, and ATT (among others) until they can renegotiate a better deal with the companies they provide service to. That will make the company more valuable when they sell it to ATT or whoever. The service CAN be shut off at midnight. They may get a new deal by then or they may put in some interim agreement or they may shut the whole thing down. That’s about it.
Green Bean, today was the deadline for Excite@home, who is bankrupt, and its creditors to come to an agreement. Those include investors in excite@home who feel that AT&T, who has an offer on the table to buy excite@home, should pay more.
The judge ruled in favor of the creditors and bondholders, some of whom who want the service shut down, so they can save money while negotiating with AT&T and the cable operators. This can affect around 4 million cable modem users in the US.
I am sure somebody will be around to explain it better than I.
uhh, I guess the first link I posted is dead, but the other 2 work.
all is clear on the home front 
er, I mean the @home front
I guess I should say I’m with Mediacom cable in Iowa City, Iowa.
My email server died, but I still have web access. Formerly AT&T Broadband in Chicago til @Home took over. <sigh>
I still have email and full net access here in Abq with Comcast, I hope they aren’t just stringing us out for the weekend.
My internet server just died. I am using my dial up connection for work to set up my TCP/IP connections, and using my browser as normal. At least I don’t have to install AOHell or shit like that.