What you missed was the all optical switch they announced a couple of weeks ago.
And what about Cisco's optical transport products that it recently bought from Cerent?
Previously, optical had to be converted to electronic to go thru the router. If Lucent's optical switch works, this won't be the case.
Again, hence their $6.8 billion purchase of Cerent.
Neadless to say, as GG says, AT&T's copper network is rapidly becoming a historic relic.
I fail to see the link between this and Cisco dying. You don't think that AT&T has a fibre network yet? I'll admit that it probably doesn't have nearly the capacity of the young fibre baron companies such as QWST (who, BTW, is a big purchaser of Cisco 12000 GSR routers ;).
Cisco has never been the first-to-market company for cutting edge products. I can think of plenty of examples, such as FastEthernet switching, gigabit ethernet switching, layer 3 switching, ATM switching, etc. Let's take Layer 3 Switches for an example. When these products were coming out of competitors shops, the Cisco thread was filled with people saying that these new Layer 3 Switches would canabalise Cisco's routers. This was to be the end of Cisco. Well, guess what? Cisco came out with a Layer 3 Switch and now they have about 40% of the market (okay, I'm guessing the number, but I know they have a huge lead over their competitors for these things ;o). And they have increased their lead in the router business.
My point is that they have been in this situation before. Never underestimate the power of the Cisco train. They no doubt have a lot of competition these days from the terabit router companies and the optical switch makers. And they could very well be toast in five years. But, at this juncture, I am not prepared to make that bet (especially since they have accelerated their growth rate to nearly 50%)!
Have advised B-in-law to dump CSCO--to much risk of failure at this point.
So you are advising someone to drop CSCO because of their wireless initiative? Wow, that is bold, considering that wireless currently is, if anything at all, less than 1% of Cisco. :o)
BWDIK,
Justin
(Can you guess that I am long on CSCO ;) |
