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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND)
ASND 207.04+0.7%Dec 8 3:59 PM EST
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To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (35172)2/17/1998 9:55:00 PM
From: George T. Santamaria  Read Replies (3) of 61433
 
Cable has one very big advantage going for it in the form of reduced infrastructure installation and maintenance costs.

A telco has to install and maintain a tw pr of wire for each cust all of the way to his exchange. Those big, thick black telephone cables that you see on poles have hundreds of twisted pair in each and there are numerous junctions that have to be spliced by hand over the route from the exchange to the customer's premises. Every time a car clips a pole or a manhole gets flooded and service is disabled, much of that hand labor has to be redone. Most of that infrastructure already exists but it is aging and it will someday have to be replaced at today's union labor costs. Much of the work in maintaining telco tw pr just goes into manually checking and rechecking the physical routing of a twisted pair through various junction boxes, manholes and cross-connects.

The cable service for a cluster of hundreds of customers can be delivered over a single coax. At certain points or nodes in the network, data services for clusters of customers are combined into a fiber optic backbone and this connects the cable customers to the internet. All routing, other than the physical placement of those nodes and association of customers with particular nodes, can be handled electronically and the cost of doing that can only be expected to decline with time.

I wouldn't be surprised if xDSL standardization efforts never get concluded. Cable operators have proven that they don't really need standardization to get their ISP operations off the ground.
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