How did @Home Network become a $35 billion company?
@Home Network started in 1995 on a bet that cable television wiring, not the telephone line, was the fastest way into an American living room. Milo Medin built the engineering side. William Randolph Hearst III ran it as the first chief executive. The money came from Kleiner Perkins and from three cable operators that already had the lines in the ground: Tele-Communications Inc., Comcast and Cox Communications.
The division of labor was clean. The cable companies installed the modems and billed the customer. @Home Network ran the network, the portal and the support. Subscribers got a connection that stayed on all day and moved data at rates no telephone modem could reach, which mattered enormously to anyone used to waiting on a 28.8k modem to load a single page.
The company went public in 1997 and the stock did what broadband stocks did in the late 1990s. By the first quarter of 1999, At Home Corporation, as the filings called it, traded at $128.34 a share and carried a market capitalization of roughly $35 billion. It had about 330,000 broadband subscribers at the time, which works out to more than $100,000 of market value per customer.
Why did @Home pay $6.7 billion for a losing search portal?
Excite was a search engine and web portal of the same 1995 vintage, competing with Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista for the job of being the first page anyone saw in the morning. It had the traffic. It did not have the profit.
By December 1998, Excite was negotiating to sell itself to Yahoo for somewhere between $5.5 billion and $6 billion. The merger documents At Home Corporation later filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission describe what happened next: on December 19, at the prompting of Kleiner Perkins, @Home Network chairman and chief executive Thomas Jermoluk met Excite chairman and chief executive George Bell, and the two worked out a rival deal for Excite and its debt.
The acquisition closed on January 19, 1999 at about $6.7 billion in stock, one of the largest mergers between two internet companies up to that point. The combined business took the public name Excite@Home while the shares kept trading as At Home Corporation.
The theory was vertical integration. Own the pipe, own the homepage at the end of it, and sell advertising against subscribers you were already billing. Excite's separate life as a search engine ran on its own track and ended on its own terms.
What did the dot-com crash do to the numbers?
Subscriber growth was never the problem. Excite@Home went from roughly 330,000 broadband customers in early 1999 to more than 3.7 million by August 2001, and peaked at 4.1 million across the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and the Benelux countries. Demand for cable broadband was real and it was compounding.
Revenue was the problem. At Home Corporation booked about $616 million in sales for 2000 and lost $7.44 billion that year, against a $1.5 billion loss in 1999. Online advertising, the half of the model that was supposed to pay for the network buildout, went down with the startups that had been buying it.
Each quarter of 2001 was worse than the one before. Excite@Home lost $832.6 million in the first quarter, $346.3 million in the second and $271.3 million in the third, when sales fell to $138.4 million from $169.9 million a year earlier. A company once valued at $35 billion was burning more cash in a single quarter than it collected in revenue across a full year.
Why did AT&T refuse to save its own investment?
Excite@Home never owned the cable. It rented access to lines that belonged to its partners, and after AT&T absorbed Tele-Communications Inc. the largest of those partners was also the company's controlling shareholder. A restructuring on August 28, 2000 lifted AT&T's voting control from 56 percent to 74 percent. By mid-2001, AT&T held 74 percent of the votes against a 23 percent equity stake.
That is an awkward position for everyone involved: enough control to steer the company, not enough ownership to lose much if it died. AT&T was also building its own broadband business and had no lasting reason to keep paying a middleman for access to its own wires. When Excite@Home needed cash in 2001, AT&T did not provide it.
Excite@Home filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California on September 28, 2001, and announced the filing on October 1. Chief executive Patti Hart called it "a tool to protect the value of the broadband business," and the same announcement set out a deal to sell that business to AT&T for $307 million in cash. That is close to one percent of the 1999 peak valuation.
How did 850,000 customers lose service overnight?
The creditors did not think $307 million was enough. Their leverage was the network itself, and they used it. In court papers, Excite@Home accused them of wanting to "play a 'game of chicken' in which the threat of a blackout is used to extort" the cable companies into paying more for service.
The court let it happen. On November 30, 2001, Judge Thomas Carlson ruled that Excite@Home could reject its master distribution agreements with the cable operators, saying the contracts, which executives put at around $6 million a week, were "clearly burdensome." Negotiations with AT&T ran into Saturday morning and broke down. Service to about 850,000 AT&T customers went dark on December 1, 2001. Comcast and Cox Communications had already begun moving their own subscribers onto networks they controlled.
The remaining 1,350 employees were laid off over the following months. The estate kept litigating for years. In May 2005, AT&T agreed to pay $340 million to settle claims brought by the At Home Corporation bondholders' liquidating trust, with Comcast reimbursing half of that amount; the trust put its total recovery at about $400 million once reserved funds were released.
Who owns Excite today, and is the site still up?
Excite@Home the company does not exist in 2026. The two assets it held went in opposite directions.
The network went to AT&T and became AT&T Broadband. On December 19, 2001, AT&T announced a $72 billion merger of that unit with Comcast, covering more than 22 million subscribers, and the deal closed in November 2002. The coaxial plant @Home Network helped light up in the late 1990s is part of what Comcast sells as Xfinity today, which is the closest thing to a happy ending in this story.
The portal changed hands more often. Excite was sold to iWon in 2002, iWon's business was folded into Ask Jeeves, and Ask Jeeves was acquired by IAC. In 2026, excite.com still loads. It is operated by Ask Media Group on behalf of Ask Applications, an IAC business, and its search results are supplied by System1. There is no Excite crawler and no Excite index behind the box. The same parent company shut Ask.com down in 2026, which is a fair measure of how much of that business is left.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happened to Excite@Home?
Excite@Home, the broadband company created when @Home Network bought the Excite portal in January 1999, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 28, 2001. AT&T agreed to buy its broadband network for $307 million, and the service was switched off on December 1, 2001, cutting off roughly 850,000 AT&T customers.
Who owns excite.com now?
excite.com is an IAC property in 2026, operated by Ask Media Group on behalf of Ask Applications. The portal passed through iWon and Ask Jeeves after Excite@Home's 2001 bankruptcy, and its search results are now supplied by System1 rather than by any Excite index of its own.
How much was Excite@Home worth at its peak?
Excite@Home traded at $128.34 a share in the first quarter of 1999, for a market capitalization of about $35 billion. Less than three years later, AT&T bought the Excite@Home broadband network out of bankruptcy for $307 million, roughly one percent of that peak value.