It's dangerous to post estimates. A few hours later and they're outdated;
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PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 10, 1999--Alcatel, acknowledged as the world leader in ADSL(1)(Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) broadband access technology, has now shipped over one million ADSL lines. The growth in demand for ADSL among many of the world's carriers has exceeded all expectations. Earlier this year, Alcatel expected sales of one million lines in 1999. As of today, the company has already attained this goal and now anticipates sales reaching at least 1.3 million lines by year-end 1999.
ADSL is the world's leading Digital Subscriber Line technology. It provides data rates of up to 8 Mbit/s over standard copper telephone lines. Users can simultaneously make phone calls or send faxes while accessing the Internet at high speed.
"The ADSL market is now ramping up quickly and companies at all levels of the ADSL foodchain from chips to equipment and service providers are getting very excited. From 1997 through 1998 the ADSL customer equipment market (CPE) was clearly lagging behind a much stronger ADSL Central Office (CO) growth. However, today the ADSL-CPE market is rapidly building momentum due to increased service deployments and bundling of ADSL modems in PCs," said Jouni Forsman, an analyst with Gartner Group's Dataquest.
Sales of Alcatel ADSL lines to date have been predominantly to operators in the US where Alcatel has clearly reinforced its ADSL leadership position. Fuelled by the tremendous demand for ADSL service, one of Alcatel's most prominent US customers, SBC, recently announced that they had reached the significant milestone of 100,000 ADSL subscribers, becoming the single largest ADSL provider in the world. SBC is deploying Alcatel's A1000 ADSL products to offer ADSL services to more than 10 million homes. The rapidly growing Asia-Pacific market accounts for 15% of the Alcatel ADSL lines shipped so far in 1999 while Europe, where ADSL deployments are just now getting underway, contributed 5%.
Analysts however forecast that the European market for ADSL is about to explode. In a recent note to investors, the global investment banking firm Lehman Brothers said: "The potential for uptake of ADSL in Europe may be even higher than in the US, given the relative attractiveness over dial-up local call charges for the residential market in Europe and the potential to drive demand for broadband capability in the SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise) market."
"Alcatel - the only vendor with extensive, worldwide large-scale operational ADSL deployment experience(2) - is extremely well positioned to take up this challenge in Europe," added Martin de Prycker.
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