Excite@Home

» see home.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

excite@home was the cable broadband joint venture that taught american suburbia what "always on" felt like. it ran on coax instead of telephone, at 1.5 megabits while most of the planet was still negotiating 33.6k. you could buy it through every major us cable operator.

at peak it had 4.1 million subscribers in north america, with smaller footholds in japan and australia. in january 1999 the cable-backed isp paid $6.7 billion in stock for the excite portal so it could be a content company too. by october 2001 the stock was worth roughly nothing and the cable partners were trying to escape the joint venture. the company filed chapter 11 and started telling customers to migrate.

excite@home never reached turkey. by 1999 i was on ttnet, somewhere in the 33.6k to 56k handoff, and "broadband" was the word americans were starting to throw around in tech magazines that arrived three months late. the idea that you could pay one cable bill and have a leased-line speed forever sounded like a us problem in the best possible sense.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the play made sense on paper. tci and the other cable operators had the wire into the house. @home network was supposed to be the brain on top of it: a national isp running across all their fiefdoms, with a single brand that customers could trust. milo medin's team built the backbone while the cable companies delivered the modems. excite was supposed to be the homepage.

for a couple of years it actually worked. by 2000 if you had cable in a major us metro you probably had excite@home, and the home page on first launch was excite.com. it was the closest the us came to a single integrated broadband brand before the cable companies decided they wanted to run their own portals.

~ the fall ~

the $6.7 billion excite acquisition was the breaking point. the cable partners had bought into a backbone provider, not an internet portal whose ad market was about to be vaporized. when the dot-com bust took excite's revenue, the cable operators wanted out of the joint venture and the bondholders wanted to be paid. there was no version of that math that worked for everyone at the table.

~ how it actually ended ~

chapter 11 went in on october 1, 2001. comcast and cox announced they would migrate their subscribers off the @home backbone by q1 2002. for several million broadband customers the practical result was a notice in the mail and a few weeks to find a new isp. the brand that taught the us what cable internet felt like was gone before it taught the rest of the world the same thing.

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