Flutterby™! : More broadband musings

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More broadband musings

2001-12-03 16:46:37+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

I'm writing this from work. My home net access is still gone, AT&T is saying "10 days", which I'm taking to mean "next Monday". But I thought about this a little bit more. AT&T[Wiki] apparently has roughly 1 million subscribers. After ramping up for the .com boom, they've probably got gigaparsecs of dark fiber. @Home was getting $20/month/user. AT&T[Wiki] was offering $307M @Home, 15 months of fees. Now AT&T[Wiki] gets to switch all of those customers over to its own network, which is currently under-utilized, and it gets to use @Home as a scapegoat for the outages during the switchover, and the cost is "2 days of service for every day of outage", so roughly "no revenue realized for December", about $35M.

Boy I'd like to hear the bondholder's side of the story, it's gotta be... well... something.

[ related topics: New Economy broadband ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:33:33+00 by: Dan Lyke

Aha! According to this news.com article on the AT&T pullout from the Excite@Home purchase the debt was structured such that the bondholders who queered the deal would only have gotten anything[Wiki] had the price doubled. Thus they had nothing to lose. Something to think about when structuring debt: Don't give veto power to the guys downhill...