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 COLUMN
Who'll replace @Home? SOON @HOME WILL be only a distant memory, but you can bet its spirit will live on in the hearts of other broadband providers. Unfortunately.
Nonetheless, as we'll see over the coming weeks, there's no shortage of potential successors to @Home's crown of king of the broadband gripes. Before we get into all that, however, I do want to say that I'll miss @Home in one respect. It was an organization that couldn't keep a secret. I suspect this was a result of the company's unique relationships with its cable partners, several of which had large investments in @Home but also had their own agendas in the broadband space. Whatever the reason, customers who complained about @Home were aware of what the company's actual intentions were because there were always internal company documents leaking out on the Internet. Thus, when @Home quietly instituted a speed limit on uploads, we could all see its memo to the cable companies showing that it was indeed trying to keep customers in the dark about the performance limitation. That's the part I'm going to miss now -- when broadband suppliers try to get away with charging more for less. We may suspect what their true intentions are, but we won't have the proof. Following the ISP shakeout of 2001, broadband customers are often finding that they either must pay more for less or do without. "I find it amazing that in a world where most technology is getting cheaper, we [early adopters of broadband] are being punished for our foresight by having our service cut 50 percent or our rates more than doubled," writes one reader after his cable modem service cut its speed from 800Kbps to 400Kbps for the same $40 monthly rate. Thinking he would switch to DSL, he was disappointed to discover his neighbor's DSL rates were about to double. "How many people would be outraged if their cable TV or phone service suddenly announced they were going to charge half-again or twice as much for the same service? I bet the calls and letters to the Public Utility Commission would be overwhelming!" It's not just price and performance on which broadband users find themselves getting the short end of the stick. Features that have long been part of one's service can suddenly disappear, often with no notice or only the vaguest of explanations. A number of broadband providers, particularly SBC Communications and its affiliates, have cut back on their customers' ability to access Usenet newsgroups. "Groups that will not be offered are alt.binaries with some combination of the following suffixes: sounds, mp3, cd.image(s), movies, multimedia, warez, vcd," says a notice received by some PacBell DSL customers. "After evaluating our customers' newsgroup usage patterns and the cost of providing the service, and in combination with the threat of copyright infringement liability, we decided not to offer alt.binary newsgroups that include large, multipart postings." One thing that customers can lose as ISPs merge and trade their accounts is their e-mail address. The hassles of informing correspondents about the change, before messages to your old address stop being fowarded, can be made all the more irritating when you discover it wasn't really necessary. One on-going drama started last April when MSN and Qwest announced a strategic alliance; while in actuality it's a marketing deal in which Qwest promotes MSN to its residential DSL customers as its "ISP of choice," customers have generally gotten the impression that their accounts have been acquired by MSN and that they have no choice but to migrate. Only after migrating did a number of readers discover, much to their chagrin, that they could have in fact chosen another ISP besides MSN. What's more, for just a few extra dollars a month, they could have moved their account to Qwest's small-business service and preserved their Qwest.net e-mail address. Perhaps the most remarkable example of an ISP instituting an arbitrary limitation was Verizon's move last August to force customers to send e-mail from an address with a Verizon-owned domain name. "We are taking this action as a result of our continuing efforts to improve the quality and reliability of Verizon's mail system, and [it] is one of several steps to help reduce spam," the notice Verizon sent to customers reads. "The effect of this change is that Verizon Online e-mail will no longer support sending e-mail from other ISP accounts or privately branded domains that are not hosted by Verizon Online." As many observers have pointed out, the policy seems unlikely to deter any serious spammers one iota. At the same time, it's at least a minor inconvenience for many Verizon customers and can be particularly bothersome for those whose own domains are hosted elsewhere. Too bad we don't have any internal Verizon documents telling us what's behind this. But a hint of the company's intent comes from the same notice, in which, along with other work-arounds, Verizon suggests users "consider one of Verizon Online's business products such as Managed Messaging, Outsourced E-mail, or Web hosting solutions; all of these solutions will accommodate the sending and receiving of non-Verizon domain e-mails." Somewhere, the spirit of @Home is smiling. Ed Foster is InfoWorld's reader advocate. Contact him at gripe@infoworld.com. Discuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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