morning, 750,000; and essentially all 850,000 were on the new network by Friday morning, less than a week after the bankruptcy court's ruling. Sometime that week, AT&T withdrew its $307 million bid for AtHome's network assets. Cox and Comcast came up with $355 mil- lion to keep their customers connected for ninety days until they could build their own networks. Of course, some people complained about the length of the holding time for customer care. There was online grumbling that the company limited download speeds to I.5 megabits to conserve bandwidth. A few computers didn't function properly with the new AT&T service. And conspiracy theories about "who really killed AtHome" popped up here and there; in fact, like Elvis sightings, they persist to this day. But the media coverage was generally positive. Many customers were im- pressed with the speed with which they were back on line, even if it took a few days, and most customers said that the new service was more reliable. If I had to do it over again, I would be more aggressive in commu- nicating our earlier efforts to help AtHome improve its network per- formance. Ironically, few people, even in the technical media, understood how fragile the AtHome network had been. And no one outside the cable companies using the AtHome service understood that in the early weeks of 200I, a dedicated team of AT&T engineers had pulled it back from a slow meltdown. Of course, at the time, our primary goal was to avoid embarrassing the leadership of AtHome, who might have known how to peddle advertising, but did not have a clue as to how to build and run a network. But that reticence allowed the seeds of conspiracy theories to take root. The final curtain fell SO swiftly on AtHome that many people thought some unseen hand must have been pulling ropes to bring it down. AtHome's creditors seeded the media with grand conspiracy theories to bolster the suits they were filing against the company. They succeeded in getting both Forbes and Business Week to repeat their alle- gations, 