@Home Network was a high-speed cableInternet service provider from 1996 to 2002. It was founded by Milo Medin, cable companies Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), Comcast, and Cox Communications, and William Randolph Hearst III, who was their first CEO, as a joint venture to produce high-speed cable Internet service through two-way television cable infrastructure. At the company's peak, it provided high-speed Internet service for 4.1 million subscribers in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the Benelux nations (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg). The company operated as four joint ventures, three of which were international. In 1999, the company acquired Excite. In 2001 the original US company filed for bankruptcy in the US courts. During the bankruptcy process, the Japanese partner bought the @Home trademark for use in Japan and the Benelux partner bought the @Home trademark for use in Europe.
In December 1998, Excite was in merger negotiations with Yahoo! inc in an agreement to purchase the Excite portal for a price between $5.5 billion and $6 billion. On December 19, at Kleiner Perkins prompting, @Home Network's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Thomas Jermoluk met with Excite's chairman and CEO George Bell, according to documents filed with the SEC, and a deal was hashed out for the purchase of Excite and its debt.[citation needed]
On January 19, 1999, @Home Networks acquired the Internet portal Excite. The $6.7 billion merger became one of the largest mergers of two Internet companies ever; the combined entity would marry @Home's profitable high-speed Internet network of @Home and expand its existing Home.com portal with Excite's money-losing search engine and Internet portal. The combined entity's external name became Excite@Home, however the stock symbol and regulatory filing records remained properly known as At Home Corporation (ATHM).[citation needed]
As a side effect of the deal, @Home's chairman and chief executive George Tom Jermoluk (also called T.J. for short) stepped down as chief executive officer but remained chairman of the board, and Excite's former chairman and chief executive George Bell, who was the president of the Excite division of @Home, moved over as chief executive of the new Excite@Home entity.[citation needed]
The new Excite division took the existing @home.com web portal that was provided to service subscribers and merged it with the Excite portal. Along with this was the movement toward personalized web portal content, a concept now commonplace in all Internet portals today.[citation needed]
In just months following the merger, Excite@Home's Excite division purchased iMall for about $425 million in stock. Most significant of these was the purchase of the online greeting card company Blue Mountain Arts, Excite@Home issued 11.2 million shares, worth close to $430 million, and paid $350 million in cash. In addition, Excite paid for sponsorship of InfinitiIndyCar driver Eddie Cheever, Jr., through the 2000 and 2001 Indy racing seasons for an undisclosed amount.[citation needed]
On June 10, 1999, the @Home cable division announced a joint venture with Australia with Cable & Wireless Optus to form a new company, AtHome Network Australia. The projected homes passed for the deal was 2.2 million.[citation needed]
The merger between Excite and @Home fell disastrously short of expectations. The stock which once soared at $128.34 a share in the first quarter of 1999 and had a market cap of $35 billion had fallen to $1 a share by the third quarter of 2001 when the company formally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The new Chief Executive George Bell worked from his home in Massachusetts and the Chief Financial Officer Mark McEachen lived in LA, flying in only once per week to the Bay Area to conduct business. Both executives were part of the former Excite executive team. More significantly, expenses ran far ahead of revenues. The burst of the dot-com bubble in March 2000 and the subsequent collapse of the Internet advertising market further limited the company's prospects by making it harder to raise investor money to keep the company afloat in the absence of retained earnings. By 2001, the company was running out of cash.[citation needed]
On September 21, 2000, George Bell stepped down as chief executive officer and reprised his role as president of the Excite division. The stock was trading at $15.38 a share, a drop of 90% of the company's evaluation during his leadership. On April 23, 2001, Patti S. Hart, the former chief executive officer of Telocity joined Excite@Home as its third CEO and @Home's fourth. In the same announcement, the outgoing chairman George Bell resigned and left the company completely. The news was not good, as the company also reported a first-quarter net loss of $61.6 million, or 15 cents per share, on revenue of $142.8 million compared with a loss of $4.6 million, or 1 cent, on revenue of $138 million in the same period the prior year.[citation needed]
Excite@Home headquarters for sale. The buildings have since been re-purposed as a medical facility.
On June 11, 2001, Excite@Home announced that it had raised $100 million in fresh financing from Promethean Capital Management and Angelo Gordon & Co. Part of the deal not widely disclosed was that the loan was repayable immediately if Excite@Home stock was delisted by Nasdaq. The loan, structured as a note convertible into shares of Excite, had an interest rate of zero. The key aspect of the deal was that Promethean gained first dibs on Excite's assets.[citation needed]
By August 20, 2001, @Home fired their auditor firm Ernst & Young, replacing them with PricewaterhouseCoopers. In addition, they received a demand for the immediate repayment of $50 million in debt by bondholders Promethean Capital Management and Angelo Gordon & Co. At the same time, both Cox Cable and Comcast announced that they would separate from the broadband Internet service by Q1 of 2002.[citation needed]
On October 1, 2001, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California. The company's remaining 1,350 employees would be laid off over the following months into the first quarter of 2002. As part of the agreement, @Home's national high-speed fiber network access would be sold back to AT&T for $307 million in cash. At Home Liquidating Trust became the successor company to Excite@Home charged with the sale of all assets of the former company.[citation needed]
After the company's demise, the four Excite@Home headquarters buildings at 450 Broadway Street in Redwood City, California, were purchased by Stanford University Medical Center, greatly remodeled, and reopened as the new home of the Stanford Medicine Outpatient Clinics in 2009. The shells were largely preserved, but the interiors are completely new, providing facilities that had been unavailable in the Palo Alto location. The buildings, plainly labeled Stanford Medicine, are easily visible from the freeway, U.S. 101, where the buildings labeled Excite@Home had previously been.[citation needed]
Features
Features of the @Home network were fairly standardized from one cable provider to another cable provider. All users of the service were granted email addresses which were (username)@home.net. Users were also given a special content-rich start page on the Internet, which was specifically created for broadband speeds at a time when very few websites on the Internet were geared towards broadband users. Users were also granted access to other Excite websites such as Blue Mountain and their greeting card by email service. Also as part of the @Home experience, users were provided with a special Excite@Home web browser which was essentially an @Home re-branded version of Mozilla Firefox with Excite@Home enabled features built within the browser. Additionally, besides the web browser users could also download the Excite@Home powered Instant Messenger, and @Home Assistant desktop widget, which had features like Excite's Search and current wire service news, along with an Internet radio portal known as "TuneIn" (which has no connection or relation to the current-day streaming provider of the same name).
Cobranded @Home services
AT&T@Home (formerly TCI@Home before the purchase of TCI by AT&T)
In 1999, @Home Network founded @Home Benelux BV, together with Intel Corporation and the (now former) Dutch companies EDON NV & Palet Kabelcom BV. @Home Benelux BV was based in Amsterdam. Later, N.V. Energie-Distributiebedrijf Oost- en Noord-Nederland (EDON) (then called Essent) got full ownership of @Home Benelux BV, and the company was called Essent Kabelcom. In February 2007, Essent sold Essent Kabelcom to private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Cinven, and the company was once again called @Home (now without the 'Benelux'-part).[1][2][3] On May 16, 2008, @Home merged with cable providers Casema and Multikabel into Ziggo, thus becoming the largest cable provider of The Netherlands.
Comcast Corporation, formerly known as American Cable Systems and then Comcast Holdings, is a multinational telecommunications and media conglomerate incorporated and headquartered in Philadelphia.
Excite is an American website operated by IAC that provides outsourced internet content such as a metasearch engine, with outsourced weather and news content on the main page. As of 2024, all of Excite's operations are controlled by services outside of the business.
Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) was a cable television provider in the United States, and for most of its history was controlled by Bob Magness and John Malone.
Charter Communications, Inc., is an American telecommunications and mass media company with services branded as Spectrum. The company is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut.
A data cap, often referred to as a bandwidth cap, is a restriction imposed on data transfer over a network. In particular, it refers to policies imposed by an internet service provider to limit customers' usage of their services; typically, exceeding a data cap would require the subscriber to pay additional fees. Implementation of a data cap is sometimes termed a fair access policy, fair usage policy, or usage-based billing by ISPs.
Level 3 Communications was an American multinational telecommunications and Internet service provider company headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado. It ultimately became a part of CenturyLink, where Level 3 President and CEO Jeff Storey was installed as Chief Operating Officer, becoming CEO of CenturyLink one year later in a prearranged succession plan.
Comcast Cable Communications, LLC, doing business as Xfinity, is an American telecommunications business segment and division of the Comcast Corporation. It is used to market consumer cable television, internet, telephone, and wireless services provided by the company. The brand was first introduced in 2010; prior to that, these services were marketed primarily under the Comcast name.
Midco is a regional cable provider, providing a triple play service of cable television, Internet and telephone service for both North Dakota and South Dakota, along with much of Minnesota, and several communities in Kansas and Wisconsin. The company's business-class service also provides direct fiber-optic communications services via leased data circuits for larger companies.
Subscription television in Australia is provided using technologies such as cable television, satellite television and internet television by a number of companies unified in their provision of a subscription television service. Notable actors in the sector include Foxtel, Netflix and Stan. Regulation of the sector is assured by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Time Warner Cable, Inc. (TWC) was an American cable television company. Before it was acquired by Charter Communications on May 18, 2016, it was ranked the second largest cable company in the United States by revenue behind only Comcast, operating in 29 states. Its corporate headquarters were located in the Time Warner Center in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, with other corporate offices in Stamford, Connecticut; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Herndon, Virginia.
Broadstripe is a telecommunications and cable company owned by WideOpenWest and Anne Arundel Broadband, with WideOpenWest holding a majority stake in the company. Serving communities in Maryland, Broadstripe serves residential customers with WOW! serving business customers, with entertainment and communications products including digital cable, home phone and broadband internet services.
RCN Corporation, originally Residential Communications Network, founded in 1993 and based in Princeton, New Jersey, was the first American facilities-based ("overbuild") provider of bundled cable telephony, cable television, and internet service delivered over its own hybrid fiber-coaxial local network as well as dialup and DSL Internet service to consumers in the Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. areas.
In the United States, net neutrality—the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) should make no distinctions between different kinds of content on the Internet, and to not discriminate based on such distinctions—has been an issue of contention between end-users and ISPs since the 1990s. With net neutrality, ISPs may not intentionally block, slow down, or charge different rates for specific online content. Without net neutrality, ISPs may prioritize certain types of traffic, meter others, or potentially block specific types of content, while charging consumers different rates for that content.
The Internet in South Africa, one of the most technologically resourced countries on the African continent, is expanding. The internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .za is managed and regulated by the .za Domain Name Authority (.ZADNA) and was granted to South Africa by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1990. Over 60% of Internet traffic generated on the African continent originates from South Africa. As of 2020, 41.5 million people were Internet users.
The Internet in the United States grew out of the ARPANET, a network sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense during the 1960s. The Internet in the United States of America in turn provided the foundation for the worldwide Internet of today.
Internet bottlenecks are places in telecommunication networks in which internet service providers (ISPs), or naturally occurring high use of the network, slow or alter the network speed of the users and/or content producers using that network. A bottleneck is a more general term for a system that has been reduced or slowed due to limited resources or components. The bottleneck occurs in a network when there are too many users attempting to access a specific resource. Internet bottlenecks provide artificial and natural network choke points to inhibit certain sets of users from overloading the entire network by consuming too much bandwidth. Theoretically, this will lead users and content producers through alternative paths to accomplish their goals while limiting the network load at any one time. Alternatively, internet bottlenecks have been seen as a way for ISPs to take advantage of their dominant market-power increasing rates for content providers to push past bottlenecks. The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has created regulations stipulating that artificial bottlenecks are in direct opposition to a free and open Internet.
John O’Farrell is an Irish venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz, which he joined in June 2010 as its third general partner. He serves on the boards of PagerDuty, Slack, Factual, GoodData, Granular, IFTTT, ItsOn and the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties.
Comcast Business is a subsidiary of Comcast, which, through several iterations, has handled the sales, marketing, and delivery of internet, phone, and cable television to businesses. In 2012, Comcast Business grew by 34%, the fastest growth of any of Comcast's products in 2012, reaching $2.4 billion in revenue. In 2013, Comcast Business generated $3.2 billion in revenue, an increase of 26% over 2012 revenue.
Ziggo B.V. is the largest cable operator in the Netherlands, providing digital cable television, Internet, and telephone service to both residential and commercial customers.
VodafoneZiggo Group B.V. is a Dutch joint venture between Vodafone Group Plc and Liberty Global Plc, announced in February 2016, approved by the European Commission in August 2016 and completed in December 2016.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
