Stan, thanks for that enhanced version of the Monterey white paper.
I had been impressed with them from the start, some time ago, back in February of this year, when I first came across a feature story on them in Lightwave Magazine.
I've discussed them with others here in SI many times while they were still private. So, in a way, I had prepared an answer for you in advance. Several answers, in fact. To point to just two of them:
techstocks.com
techstocks.com
The Lightwave story url is
pennwell.shore.net
And a later Techweb reference exists in the second.
techweb.com
Note the title of the Techweb article: "It's Sonet Stupid." Actually, from my perspective a better article could be written titled:
"It's the Ports, Stupid!"
Focusing on the I/O ports would have been more appropriate, IMO. Sonet , itself, and the fiber it rode in on, is actually rather plentiful and free flowing on the core side, relative to the customer side. Access ports to subscribers and to other service providers from Sonet muxes belonging to incumbent LECs and IXSs, on the other hand, are three to six months behind, because they are on back order. No fooling, it's all rather amazing when you think about it. Here's what happened:
The incumbents put in place a just-in-time method of provisioning bandwidth on the customer side, about six to eight years ago. The problem is simply that,
Someone forgot to tell the Incumbents about the Internet!
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In some ways I was disappointed to see Monterey "taken out" so soon by CSCO, which was at the same time that they acquired Cerent. It would have been interesting, I think, to see what they could have done on their own. And the premium they received was nowhere near what their newfound sibling received. The reverse order relationship of high and low prices paid for those two companies by CSCO has made me wonder, to this day. And, as if to highlight my confusion and taunt the situation a bit, the Techweb link that I listed above in April showed Sycamore as an Also Startup in the same context as Monterey, but only after describing Monterey. And look at the valuation of SCMR, today. Anyone know what SCMR's market cap is today?
Getting back to Cerent, I now hear that CSCO is doing some really nifty things with them on the local loop/customer interface side. So, who knows at this point. They may still get their close to seven billion worth out of them, after all.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
