Reduced access
I've been very happy with my AT&T @Home cable-modem service this past year. I was just thinking that last week, in fact: it's such a relief to no longer have to call EarthLink Broadband tech support every week, stay on the phone with them for hours, yell and wheedle, schedule appointments with Pac Bell techs who never show (and if they do show, they file reports that are then ignored or lost), etc. And even when the ELN DSL connection was working (which, I admit, was most of the time), I had to jump through hoops to make connections; sometimes I had to reboot before I could connect, other times I just had to wait a full minute to make a connection (slower than dialup). With the cable modem, all of that is gone. I plug the cable into the back of my PowerBook, and I'm instantly online. Never had any service outages, never even had to call tech support.
Somehow I missed the fact that Excite@Home had filed for chapter-11 bankruptcy.
So now AT&T is switching all their broadband customers over to a new network; they'll call sometime in the next week to give an estimate of when things will be ready.
Oh, well. I'll wait and see how long it's likely to be; I do like having a cable modem, and they've been awfully good to me so far (and having things Just Work is awfully rare in my experience). In the meantime, I'm dialing up using AOL, which means it ties up my phone line, and is slower (I've gotten spoiled), so I'll probably spend less time connected for a while. Which is probably just as well.
But I do still have email access at my regular address, so everything should be pretty much the same, just a little slower.