Gary,
I have not idea regarding von Wagoner's position.
It has not popped because the Rockwell camp is far behind USRX in deployment of 56k, and they (Rockwell, Ascend, Shiva, Zoom, Boca, Cisco, Motorola, Lucent, Microcom, et al) have been spreading FUD and trying to discredit USR. It's held them back pricewise, but they won't be able to stop it once x2 hits the street in the next week or two. USR management isn't much for tooting their own horn. As a matter of fact, they didn't even announce x2 until almost 3 weeks after Rockwell made their "big" announcement, even though USR knew they were months ahead of the competition. When they did announce, they did so with customers line AOL, Compuserve, Netcom, AT&T, IBM, Japan Telecom, Hong Kong Telecom..... etc. Rockwell likes to toot their number of ISPs, but USRX owns the big ISPs, and thus far more users & ports.
USRX has a MAJOR presence in remote access. According do some independent reports, they outsell all other competitors in RA concentrators, including Ascend. They simple are not as visible, since they don't typically disclose RA revenues. The visibility will become much clearer as the masses move to USR based ISPs in order to get 56k. Their sales in high P/E networking equipment is growing faster than their lower margin client modem business. They have also licenced their code to Cardinal and Cirrus, and collect royalties on all x2 capable chipsets sold by Texas Instruments. That's margin! Management recent stated that the expect margins to remain with the 41-42% range going forward.
David |
