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Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
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Two test markets were set up, one in Sunnyvale, and a second in Fremont. Yours truly was living in Fremont at the time, so I was one of the early guinea pigs of this experiment.
The speeds were incredible.
However, the new company was not without challenges.
For example, the internet that gets to end users runs through a series of nodes, which are local distribution points. Speed on any given node can be affected by heavy use. Even one user who chooses to upload a huge amount of data can impact other users on the same node.
So @Home decided to address this by taking away the unlimited speed and imposing a universal speed for all users. When the company applied this new feature to the Fremont market something went wrong. All our speeds suddenly slowed to a trickle.
The issue dragged on. A group of us got together and started complaining to the local cable provider. @Home’s partner was TCI at the time. Turns out something was misconfigured, which ultimately was resolved.
When @Home officially launched, cable providers throughout the U.S., Canada and beyond partnered with it. Thus, end users had a whole new world open up.
Eventually, through a series of well-publicized and well-attended meetings, I developed a relationship with company founder Milo Medin.
Over the next few years Milo’s revolutionary concept of high-speed internet began to be duplicated by other providers. This ultimately put @Home out of business.
Today the concept of high-speed internet has become a staple. However, there was a time, not that long ago when we all had a dial up modem. Those days are long gone, thanks to @Home and Milo Medin.
By the way, for locals, the @Home campus ended up becoming Stanford Health Services on Broadway in Redwood City. Needless to say they have great internet!
Everything else is just history
