Excite Says It Will Weigh Access Links Other Than Cable

Excite@Home Corp. said Friday it is considering offering its high-speed Internet service over telephone lines as well as cable networks--an acknowledgment that it may lose the exclusive right to serve millions of cable customers in 2002.

“We are looking at delivering our service on other platforms outside of cable,” a company spokeswoman said. “It’s a really smart idea to look at other forms of delivery.” A formal announcement is expected Monday.

She gave no time frame for when the company might begin offering a digital subscriber line service, or DSL, but said it saw it as an opportunity to expand its reach to customers without suitable cable access.

Founded in 1995 as a cable-only service, Excite@Home now delivers high-speed Internet access to about 1.2 million customers of 23 cable systems in the U.S. and Canada that are either part owners of the company or have exclusive contracts. Its largest shareholder is AT&T;, the nation’s second-largest cable operator.

But many of those exclusive contracts expire in 2002, at which point the cable operators are free to make deals with other Internet service providers. Several cable operators have hinted that they may not renew their deals with Excite@Home at that time. Their options then would be to either provide Internet connections to their subscribers directly or allow independent Internet Service Providers to use their high-capacity coaxial networks.

That means that Excite@Home’s very survival may depend on its delivering Internet service to consumers via other technologies, chiefly DSL, a high-speed data service using upgraded phone lines.

On Friday, the Excite@Home spokeswoman said the company was “interested in pursuing any platform of delivery” in addition to cable. She stressed that Excite@Home was “more than just an Internet connection” and included extensive media-rich content and member services.

That side of the business is also troubled, however. Traffic at the company’s Internet portal site, excite.com, which it acquired in a merger last year, has been shrinking. From November 1998 through last December the site slipped to 13th from sixth in popularity as its number of “unique visitors”--all users who visited the site during the month, counted once each--declined to 13.3 million, from 17 million.

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Times staff writer Michael Hiltzik and Reuters contributed to this report.