Skipper,
It all depends on which way you want to skin the cat. USR has the big national and multinational ISPs, plus a fair share of regionals. The smaller guys have a better modem (or ports) per subscriber ratio than do the big guys, but the big guys have 70% of the subscribers. That's why must of us "power" surfers use smaller independent ISPs - we don't want to put up with busy signals. But, the masses are willing to make that trade off.
Further, the big guys will be telling their customers (70%) to buy x2 modems, and the others will be telling their customers (30%) to buy ROK based modems. Then you have the many millions of x2 modems that can be upgraded via software, with no installed based of ROK modems being softeare upgradeable.
I'm not so certain the lead isn't still there. Rockwell says 100,000 chipsets produced by the end of the month. That's not many to go around to the 300 or so companies that are demanding them, and they have to be divied up between the client modem makers and the RA equipment makers. Even if they produce a million units per month for the next several months, it's still peanuts compared to the x2 deployment. For frame of reference, there were 25 million modems sold last year alone.
I haven't listened to the ROK conference call yet, but Hitesh said that their production for the next few months would be ROM based monolithic chipsets that can't be upgraded, meaning they are obsolete before produced. A lot of uninformed users will be suckered into buying them, but in my opinion it will only serve to hurt Rockwell's and their customers' reputation in the long term. My bet is that a lot of ROK based ISPs won't upgrade much of their equipment until the Flash based product is available. By then, the party will be over.
David |
