Cox @Home members in transition limbo

As Cox Communications moves the last of its high-speed Net customers from the vanishing @Home network to its own, a few hiccups are pushing people offline.

Some subscribers in Virginia say they've seen their connections down for four days now, with no estimate from the company as to when service will be restored.

A few other pockets in Cox territory around the country also are having service issues, according to the company's status page.

Cox is in the midst of moving about 555,000 cable Internet subscribers from the soon-to-be-defunct @Home service to a network the company has constructed on its own. Fellow cable companies AT&T and Comcast have largely completed the same task, and each experienced similar or more striking transition problems.

A spokeswoman for Cox said that there have been some scattered outages across the territory in the past few weeks as the company is changing its network, but that no major problems have occurred.

"There have not been any major outages (across the entire network) connected with the transition," the spokeswoman said. Smaller issues have popped up "in small pockets," she said.

@Home has agreed to support remaining customers for Cox and Comcast through the end of February, at which point those companies plan to have moved all of their subscribers to their own networks.

The Cox outages did not affect those customers who remain on the @Home network.

@Home declared bankruptcy in late September and decided in early December to shut down its network altogether, after AT&T withdrew a $307 million bid for the company's cable network assets.