The Road Runner e-mail problem was a different kind of failure. Customers complained that the e-mail system had been erratic for a month prior to the crash. Finally on March 5, one critical computer went down and the entire e-mail system sputtered to a halt for almost a week, angering thousands of customers. Time Warner said it had the problem fixed within a few days. Customers say it was at least five days before the e-mail system was back in operation.
Customers are glad the company learned that much.
When it doesn't work, people get ticked off. Austin broadband entrepreneur Geoff Tudor says his industry got as carried away in the same irrational exuberance as the dot-com startups did. Industry analyst Jim Rawitsch with the Aberdeen Group in Boston is more charitable. Any new industry based on new technology, he said, is going to experience growing pains. Nonetheless, he expects the number of broadband users in the United States to quadruple to 25 million by the end of 2003 as more kinds of high-speed Internet access become available to more customers.