AT&T bears a heavy burden of responsibility for the Excite@Home debacle. You might think they’d hide out for a while – but no! They have new ideas to make people even more angry.
First, it became clear right away that the service it rolled out this week to replace Excite’s service is running at less than half the speed – 1.5 megabits instead of up to 4 megabits downstream. For many uses, the reduced speed is still quite satisfying. Some people, though, subscribed to cable Internet access because they want to take advantage of its broadband capabilities – the advertised purpose of the connection. To those people, the slowdown is dramatic and unwelcome. Cutting the service in half without mentioning it shows again that AT&T could care less what its customers think. We knew that already, though.
To add insult to injury, AT&T also announced that it will introduce tiered pricing soon – charging customers more if they use more bandwidth. But heck, they’re on a roll – cable prices have been rising steadily for some time.
