Excite@Home Responds to Misleading Claims by GTE and AOL

REDWOOD CITY, Calif, June 15, 1999 - Excite@Home (Nasdaq: ATHM), the leading provider of broadband Web services and open access to the Internet via the cable infrastructure, today responded to recent claims by GTE and AOL about cable modem access. The GTE and AOL claims, which were based on a limited regional demonstration project, are part of a political effort to derail development and deployment of the nation's broadband cable Internet system.

Among other issues, Excite@Home is especially concerned that a demonstration of such limited scale, representing a limited set of customers, is not representative of what is necessary to support real world needs or the scaleable broadband capacity demands that Excite@Home has spent the last four years pioneering and understanding.

In addition, Excite@Home believes that GTE's conclusions addresses the technical issues in a na´ve fashion, attempting to force the cable network into a telco like model. In as much as it is not in the interests of GTE and AOL to facilitate the rapid deployment of broadband Internet access for consumers, their recommendations are an extension of the commitment by both companies to preserve their current business models and dominant market position at the cost of true consumer choice.

GTE's and AOL's conclusion that a simple "off-the-shelf device" can provide open cable access have oversimplified a complex technological and service issue, and would force a re-architecting of the way cable data networks operate, provision and are maintained today, slowing deployment and moving away from true multi-vendor standards that have only recently started to bear fruit.

"Here at Excite@Home, we think in terms of serving tens of millions of consumers with high-speed Internet access. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of inexperience that allows us to gloss over issues like service provisioning and management, customer support, and traffic engineering." said Milo Medin, founder and chief technology officer of Excite@Home.

Excite@Home believes that the GTE recommendation does not address many of the real world problems that would need to be solved to make universal ISP access to broadband cable systems viable. The GTE and AOL document fails to address a number of substantive issues that are critical to volume rollout of cable modem services:

• There is no way using today's standards based modem technology to adequately partition the cable network capacity in an efficient manner amongst different ISP's and services. Without this capability, it will be impossible for both the ISPs and the cable operator to cooperate adequately to deliver a reliable broadband experience to the consumer.
• GTE's approach to solving the basic network transport adds layers of complexity and overhead to the task of provisioning cable services, which will complicate troubleshooting and customer installation, in addition to requiring special software on the user's computer and reducing network performance.
• GTE's approach also mandates the replacement of standards based switching equipment used throughout the cable industry today with more proprietary solutions that add expense and complexity, reducing options in how services are deployed by the cable operator.
• Most importantly the demonstration did not address the need for the distributed network, proxy servers, and network management software that actually make a broadband network perform and scale in an end-to-end basis. The complexities of sharing these elements have not been solved by any ISP's or network providers today.

It is not only technology questions that have been glossed over by GTE, but more importantly their "easy off-the-shelf" solution does not identify how it will support the broadband customer who, based on GTE's recommendations, would be left with no clear responsible party for support. As a shared facility, the network needs management from the cable modems, the plant, the headends, and routers. With no one operator to monitor and implement the services and fix problems, fingerpointing and poor service will result.

Finally, there is no technology to implement consistent quality of service, or streaming services using multicast in a shared environment. This means broadband customers will default to lowest common denominator services, and miss out on the true power of the new technology, and the latest advances on the Web. "Announcing a trial with 3 ISPs all offering lowest common denominator service with manual processes to add subscribers with small numbers of users and asserting that all the hard problems have been solved is incredibly disingenuous," added Medin.

In addition to utilizing vague technological claims to make broader business assertions, GTE and AOL's attempts to forcibly bring in government involvement and add unnecessary regulation are particularly inappropriate given the fact that the nascent broadband market is filled with many competitors coming in through their own efforts.

"Smothering the cable-modem industry in an early growth stage is not in America's best interest," said Medin. "GTE, AOL are now using this bit of political theater to preserve their market share, a share based on their dominance in the conventional dial-up market."

Scott Broyles of the NCTA states that "we always find it ironic when our competitors tell us how to run our business, particularly GTE, which describes itself as a "substantial ISP." Whatever the technical issues, which we suspect are a lot more complicated than GTE portrays them, they miss the point. The point continues to be that consumers can go anywhere on the Internet through a cable connections. Any business issues between competing on-line providers should be resolved in the marketplace, not by government regulation."

Excite@Home is committed to continuing to provide an open access environment where consumers can access any Web content of their choice with a single click.

Excite@Home will be addressing this issue in further detail at a press conference scheduled to take place on Wednesday, June 16 at 11:00 a.m. in Washington, D.C., details will follow.

Excite@Home (Nasdaq: ATHM) is a global media company based in Redwood City, Calif. Through the company's narrowband portal, Excite (www.excite.com), and broadband services, @Home and @Work, the company uniquely offers consumers content and interactive services, across both narrowband and broadband, and advertisers highly targeted marketing solutions, across both narrowband and broadband, Leveraging the high-speed, always-on attributes of cable, Excite@Home empowers unique multimedia applications that go beyond current Web experiences. The company will combine the Excite brand - one of the best known names on the Internet with 70 percent recognition among Web users - with @Home's broad cable distribution - a worldwide footprint resulting from its agreements with 21 cable companies, to deliver on its vision of "All Band, All Device, All the Time."

For more investor information about Excite@Home, please call our stockholder services hotline at 1-888-924-9248.

Brand recognition statistics quoted are from Frank N. Magid and Associates, Inc. (1/99).

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and is subject to the safe harbors created by those sections. The matters discussed in this press release involve risks and uncertainties described from time to time in Excite@Home's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, see the risk factors described in Excite@Home's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 1999. Excite@Home assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this press release.