Excite@Home Is Revamping Software to Lure Broadband Subscribers

There’s broadband, and then there’s broadband.

Excite@Home, which with nearly 1.2 million users claims to be the largest subscriber base of any provider of high-speed, high-capacity Internet service, will soon roll out new software to make sure its subscribers get the most out of the technology.

“We wanted to upgrade the experience,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, the company’s senior vice president for online products and services, noting that many subscribers have enjoyed the benefits of high-speed Web surfing without seeing how much multimedia content is already available.

Not coincidentally, Excite@Home wanted to give its cable partners, who market the cable-modem service exclusively to customers, something new to generate sales.

The company will launch a revamped home page/portal for subscribers on March 27, along with an upgraded browser based on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5.0. Although Excite@Home in the past offered subscribers their choice of co-branded browsers from Microsoft and Netscape (which is owned by America Online), the latter is being dropped, Rosenberg said.

Subscribers will see a new home page with more multimedia material, as well as an easier way to personalize the Excite home page. For @Home subscribers only, the new browser will have a permanent search blank at the bottom border giving access to the Excite search engine.

These changes come as competition for broadband subscribers is heating up. Local telephone companies have become more aggressive at offering high-speed Internet connections via a phone-line technology known as DSL. Meanwhile, America Online’s pending merger with Time Warner gives that top-selling service access to that company’s millions of cable subscribers, many of whom are connected to broadband-ready cable systems.

Because cable franchises are all monopolies, Time Warner cable and Excite@Home are not direct competitors. But AOL says it is also upgrading its broadband offerings, which might help DSL systems compete more easily with @Home for AOL members.

Rosenberg says he believes Excite@Home will remain the premier broadband service for those whose cable operators are among the 23 members of the @Home consortium.

“We’re about embracing the Internet; AOL tries to hide it from you,” he says, referring to the numerous mouse-clicks needed to leave AOL’s proprietary service and reach the Web. “We start from a broadband perspective: We’ve been learning for four years what works and doesn’t work for the user.”