Full Article on ASND's AT&T contract, Part II
To pay for these and other investments, AT&T has said it will cut 18,000 more jobs and reduce overhead to an industry standard 22% of revenues. It also has canceled a project to build a new proprietary superswitch for the network backbone as follow-up to the company's 4ESS switches.[Could it use ASND's OC-48 GX 550 ATM core switch?]
Through it all, Armstrong gave some conservative projections for AT&T profit growth. That worried Wall Street, but gladdened IT analysts such as Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects, Inc, a Washington, D.C. consultant.
"What he was saying is: Don't expect 'the savings' to be returned to the shareholders," Dzubeck said,"It's going to be returned to customers."
Armstrong's plan is not guaranteed to succeed. An indication of the work remaining for AT&T was on display later in the week at ComNet, '98, where an announcement of AT&T's first set of standard FR service-level agreements (SLA) drews a lukewarm response.
For example, AT&T said it will guarantee that 99.99% of packets up to the users subscribed to committed information rate (CIR) will pass through the network.
Unlikke existing offers from MCI Communications Corp. and Sprint Corp., AT&T offered no guarantee for packets above CIR - the ones most at risk of loss.
Analysts attributed the gaps in AT&T FR SLAs to Cisco Systems, Inc.'s Stratacom switches, on which AT&T's FR network is based.
"They can't do much more than this with the Stratacom platform," Dzubeck said. Dzubeck also predicted that by next year, AT&T will de-emphasize new FR service and beef up end-to-end latency guarantees for its recently introduced WorldNet VPN service. [More opp for ASND's CBX 500 and GX 550] |
