Two recent pieces of news suggest the cable industry has moved squarely into the post-Excite@Home era and is willing to invest in the equipment that will enable new broadband services.

Excite@Home, an ISP that was co-owned by several large cable providers, was essential to cable's initial push into high-speed data services. It provided its partners with a high-capacity, high-quality backbone and the expertise necessary to roll out services.

Then it melted down. Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy late last year and finally shut down in February. Multiple system operators (MSOs) had to scramble to keep the company's roughly four million subscribers up and running.

But new developments suggest the industry is moving ahead, or at least trying to:

These announcements indicate that cable operators are moving forward with the task of deploying broadband, as they race against DSL providers to deliver value-added services to the lucrative small- and medium-sized business market. This trend was recently profiled in an Optical Oracle report (see Cable MSOs Set to Win?).

The key is that the industry survived the shutdown without panic. "They managed to keep the lights on," says Michael Harris, president of Kinetic Strategies, a cable broadband consultancy. "There have been some glitches in quality, but no mass losses in connectivity."

It is clear, however, that the demise of Excite@Home will continue to reverberate in at least three areas:

Though the industry was forced to scramble due to the drastic speed of Excite@Home’s demise, few tears were shed by MSO executives. Operators had long-term plans to phase out the organization anyway. They paid Excite@Home roughly 35 cents on the dollar for its services, and this arrangement had become antiquated as costs came down and as it became apparent that the necessary expertise could be developed in-house, or culled from the rolls of laid-off CLEC personnel.

The consensus is: What could have been a disaster has instead become an inconvenience, albeit a major one. "I think it's safe to say the industry is in the post-At Home era," Goodman says. "But it entails a lot of cleaning up behind the scenes of the At Home mess."— Carl Weinschenk, Senior Editor, Light Reading
http://www.lightreading.com

Editor's Note: Light Reading is not affiliated with Oracle Corporation.