Summary

  • Excite@Home supplied comprehensive networking and systems integration behind cable modem service sold by several US operators. It filed for Chapter 11 in September 2001 and ceased operations on 28 February 2002, according to the FCC.
  • AT&T's Excite@Home contracts ended on 1 December 2001 and AT&T moved to a network it provided itself. Cox and Comcast kept the shared service through 28 February 2002 while moving subscribers to their own networks.
  • Cox recorded an approximately $150.2 million one-time net charge for continued service and customer transition. Comcast recorded $140 million in net incremental fourth-quarter 2001 operating expenses for continuation and transition. The figures have different accounting labels and are not a national total.

A cable connection had more than one operator

A coaxial line into a house was only the visible part of a cable Internet subscription. The FCC's 2002 cable modem ruling described a service assembled from Internet access functions, applications, account provisioning, billing, maintenance and customer support. Some cable companies performed those jobs themselves. Others relied on a related or outside provider. Excite@Home, backed by cable-industry investors, supplied comprehensive networking and systems integration for multiple operators.

That arrangement made a shared service layer valuable while it worked. The retail operator could sell access over its cable plant without building every Internet function separately. It also made the provider's survival part of the customer's connection. When Excite@Home filed for Chapter 11 in September 2001, the physical cable did not vanish. The operators still needed a functioning network and the systems that attached subscribers to it.

The FCC recorded the consequences without collapsing them into one outage. AT&T, Cox, Comcast, Insight and Charter had to provide the missing functions themselves or adopt another technical and commercial model. Excite@Home's operating life ended on 28 February 2002. The dates in between mattered because a migration could be built only while subscribers still had some path to service.

Two clocks after the same bankruptcy

AT&T's contracts with Excite@Home ended on 1 December 2001. The FCC says AT&T constructed a new network and began self-providing the equipment and functions needed for its cable modem subscribers. Cox, Comcast, Insight and Charter secured continued Excite@Home service through 28 February 2002 while they moved customers to their own high-speed networks. The first group faced an immediate contractual break; the others had a finite bridge.

This distinction changes the history. “The Internet went down when a dot-com failed” makes a dramatic sentence, but it loses the operating sequence. The FCC's record has a contract boundary for AT&T, a transition window for four other operators, and a final end date for Excite@Home. Cablevision had a third path: it had already moved substantially toward self-provisioning, yet the FCC says service to its remaining @Home subscribers was cut on 10 January 2002. The same provider failure did not produce one uniform subscriber experience.

Buying time was expensive

Cox's FY2001 Form 10-K called Excite@Home its primary high-speed Internet provider. After the bankruptcy, Cox signed two agreements: one kept access running for existing and new customers through 28 February 2002; the other supplied minimal help with moving those customers to Cox High Speed Internet. Cox reported that it finished the move in February. Its filing recorded an approximately $150.2 million one-time, non-recurring net charge associated with both continued service and transition. That figure is not a per-household bill and not simply the price of extending the contract.

Comcast's FY2003 Form 10-K gives another ledger. The company paid a higher rate to continue the existing arrangement during October and November 2001. On 3 December it reached a bankruptcy-court-approved agreement for service through 28 February. It began moving subscribers in December to a Comcast-owned and managed network and completed the transition in February 2002. The filing put $140 million of net incremental operating expenses in the fourth quarter of 2001 against continued service and the move together.

The two accounting entries measure each company's own exposure under different descriptions. They still establish the same operational fact: replacing the service behind the cable was a financed project, undertaken while customers expected their connection to work. The bill arrived even though the neighborhood wire was already in the ground.

Sources