To reach the finish line in todays internet service provider race, you need speed and staying power. At Home, which has 3 million home subscribers to its Excite@Home service, credits its growth over the last year to its high-speed Internet services, but says that improving infrastructure will be crucial to continued success.
“Our broadband service allows us to offer users much greater speeds and always-on functionality,” says Seth Cohen, the companys director of market strategy. “The biggest complaints that people have about ISPs is that the service is too slow, that they get kicked off or that they get busy signals when they try to connect. We solve all three of those.”
With new CEO Patti S. Hart at the helm, the company will now focus on improving quality of service, including network performance and e-mail reliability. “We are on the bleeding edge at times, and so we need a lot more discipline around the operational performance associated with those enhancements,” explains Dave Cross, vice president of marketing in the companys @Work division.
The company is also working on offering new broadband-related products and services for home and business customers. “There will be continuing challenges in scaling technology and increasing the number of nines of reliability,” Cross says. “On the commercial side, we want to provide more customer tools so they can do self-servicing.”
In 2000, At Home extended its carrier-class infrastructure, intending to evolve into a full-blown content distribution network. “We intend to have a service that would enable the better distribution and management of rich media content, including streaming content to our subscriber base,” Cohen says.