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No Internet, no e-mail, and no answers. That's the state many AT&T Broadband users say they have found themselves in on Monday after bankrupt Excite@Home pulled the plug on their Internet access this weekend.

Excite@Home disconnected about 850,000 of AT&T Broadband's 1.4 million customers Saturday after a judge gave the company the OK. And while AT&T Broadband claims nearly 40 percent of its subscribers were back online by late Monday, many customers are displeased with the company's handling of the situation.

Angry users claim the company didn't offer enough warning about the pending outage, and claim now that they can't get straight answers about when their service will return.

"I'm stuck in an endless tech support loop," says Mill Valley, California resident Cynthia Zimber. "I'm not getting any real answers or any real information ... I'm sick of waiting on hold."

AT&T Broadband admits wait times for tech support are as long as two hours right now. But a company spokesperson says she's confident most customers will have service again by the end of the week.

"By Friday, service will be restored to all of our customers," says AT&T Broadband spokesperson Sarah Eder.

Just last week Eder estimated that in the event of a major disconnect it could take up to a month for service to be restored to some customers. However, she said Monday that the process of moving customers to the new network is "going excellent" and is "way ahead of schedule."

Conflicting Claims

"They've known about this for weeks," says Chuck La Forge, of Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, who lost service on Saturday.

"It seems they could of done a much better job keeping [us] informed. It all seems pretty hasty to me." AT&T Broadband restored La Forge's service Sunday night.

La Forge isn't the only customer who feels AT&T dropped the ball on customer notification.

"AT&T says they called or contacted every consumer about disrupted service, but I'm here to tell you they never called or contacted me," says Richard Petschke, of Tacoma, Washington.

Along with missing e-mail and Internet access, Petschke says his home page--hosted with Excite@Home--also disappeared on Saturday.

AT&T Broadband's Eder vehemently disagrees with statements that the company failed to inform customers of the possible service interruption.

Eder says AT&T Broadband sent regular postal mail and e-mail, and even telephoned customers about possible service interruptions.

"I don't know what more people want," Eder says. "We can't get people to open their mail or read their e-mail. We have done everything we can short of taking out advertisements."

Reconnected, With Problems

Many AT&T Broadband customers lucky enough to regain service face additional problems. Common gripes include sluggish service, dead home networks, and unanswered questions about missing e-mail messages.

AT&T Broadband's Eder admits the company has throttled service down to 1.5 megabits per second for downloads, while maintaining a 300-kilobits-per-second upload speed.

Customers may have to adjust to slower speeds, she says. AT&T claims Excite@Home mismanaged its network and gave many customers too much bandwidth. This practice allowed a minority of users to hog bandwidth with massive downloads that bogged down service for others, she says.

In the future, AT&T Broadband will likely offer tiered pricing for customers who demand higher download speeds, she says. The company is also considering reduced pricing for users who spend less time online.

As for the home network problems, Eder says AT&T Broadband's new network supports these products. However, the company doesn't offer technical support for home networking hardware, she says.

Despite suggestions by angry customers that a disproportionate number of home networks stopped working after the shutdown, Eder suggests it's more likely a hardware problem. Customers should contact their home networking hardware manufacturers instead of AT&T Broadband, she says.

Who's Got the E-Mail?

More frustrating than the slow connections and dead home networks is confusion regarding e-mail messages. AT&T Broadband customers with addresses ending with variations of @home must change to a derivative of @att, Eder says.

In the meantime, however, some e-mail messages sent to old @home user accounts are being bounced back to senders, while some are not, according to anecdotal reports from AT&T Broadband.

That's unacceptable, says Zimber, who is a technology consultant. She worries that business clients trying to reach her could be getting mixed signals.

"One e-mail can be the difference between closing a deal with someone or not," she says.

AT&T Broadband doesn't have an answer for Zimber at this time. "We don't have a clear handle on what is going on with sent e-mail right now," says Andrew Johnson, another AT&T Broadband spokesperson.

He deferred questions to Excite@Home. In turn, an Excite@Home spokesperson deferred questions about e-mail to AT&T Broadband.

However, AT&T Broadband says it will credit customers for two days of lost service for every day they are offline. Also, Web pages hosted on Excite@Home servers will no longer be accessible.

Business Is Business

AT&T Broadband wouldn't comment on its ongoing bid to buy Excite@Home, only to say it was still in the running.

AT&T Broadband has been working around the clock to finish work on its own high-speed network to replace Excite@Home, Eder says. Experts say this will allow the company to take a tougher line in negotiations.

AT&T Broadband said that by Monday morning it had moved 330,000 customers in Oregon, Washington state, and metropolitan Dallas to its new network. It planned to shift customers in San Francisco and Illinois by Tuesday, bringing to roughly 657,000 the number of customers on the new network.

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