December 3, 2001

Excite@Home = Crap@Best
   by mike <mike@pfft.net>

Many of you have probably heard of the recent issue with Excite@Home filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Excite provides broadband cable internet service to several million people across the U.S. through local companies who resell their service. One of those companies is my regional carrier, AT&T Broadband. We just got reamed.

Last Friday, a federal bankruptcy judge found that Excite@Home's contracts had become 'clearly burdensome' to the defunct company and dissolved them. That left Excite free to discontinue service at 12:01am PST on Saturday. That pissed me off. The judge rejected AT&T Broadband's (petty, pathetic) efforts to purchase certain network assets because he was 'confident the parties involved would come up with a solution prior to the midnight deadline' (which was then only 10 hours away). Not surprising to those of us in the IT industry, they did not.

Therefore, at 2am on Saturday, everything went to hell. Service was cancelled to AT&T Broadband only; other carriers managed to strike deals with Excite to keep their customers happy. Well dammit, what the hell?

PFFT to the judge who didn't give a damn about the million AT&T customers how are now out of service because of his dissolving the SLAs. PFFT to Excite for sucking at managing a business and failing to meet the terms of a contract. And PFFT to AT&T for being greedy, indifferent, arrogant jerkoffs who don't care about their customers. This sucks. AT&T sucks. Why should I have to wait 10-14 days because THEY couldn't strike a deal with Excite to keep service going? (They're the only one of like 12 cable companies involved who couldn't.)

Death to AT&T. You know what, I no longer wonder why people walk into buildings with submachine guns. It's quite apparent to me that some companies deserve a fate far worse than death. But oh well, I guess the worst I can do to them is write this article. So take that, you asses.

PFFT!

Published: December 3, 2001
Editor: stacy