Impact of Potential Disruption of Excite@Home Services on Comcast is Unclear
Dave Aiello wrote, "Hoping to find answers to the questions raised in the previous article about a potential disruption in Excite@Home's network services due to its bankruptcy, I called Comcast Business Communications a few minutes ago. The customer service representative I spoke with indicated that she had been told about the possibility of a disruption, but she could not tell me how many Comcast customers would be affected if it took place. She also did not know whether customers could determine their exposure to @Home Network facilities by running a traceroute or using some other network discovery technique. As far as I know, Comcast has not published a statement about the potential network disruption to any of their Web Sites."
Now that you know what we know, read on for what Dave thinks Comcast should do about it....
Dave Aiello continued:
Comcast seems to think that customers will be satisfied with free dialup internet access as a contingency until they can reroute any disrupted network traffic. Maybe this will be acceptible to consumers who are paying less than $50 per month for their cable modem service. But, customers like CTDATA will need a more robust solution, and we need it yesterday.
We hope that the Bankrupcy Court judge realizes what is at stake here. This isn't just about Mom's right to surf eBay at broadband speed:
- Some of us depend upon this service to operate our businesses.
- We paid a premium for a business Service Level Agreement.
- We chose a cable company as our provider because we thought the risk of service disruption due to carrier financial problems was much lower than in the DSL market.
We want what we are paying for. Comcast and the other creditors had better go to court on Friday with good lawyers. They need to do everything in their power to ensure continuity.