Re: ADAP's Volatility. It's no wonder, considering the fur flying in the broadband wireless access standards fight and the fact that ADAP is on new, and shaky ground trying to get acceptance of it's solution, AB-Access. Consider this synopsis from the ADAP web site of the VOFDM standards battle:
Premise:
More than 40 companies, including Lucent, Nortel, ADC, Siemens, Hughes and Alcatel have built Fixed Broadband Wireless Access solutions. All are aware of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and its variants, and only one company, WiLAN, has chosen to implement it in its product. Against this backdrop, a consortium of major players, who do not yet have a working product in the market, comes forward to propose an OFDM variant, Vector Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (VOFDM) as the standard modulation scheme for all solutions in this space. They claim that if VOFDM becomes the standard and is implemented on a broad scale ,it will enhance coverage and dramatically reduce cost. One member of the consortium holds 30 patents for the VOFDM coding scheme. Who is right and what does the answer suggest about the technology that will drive mass market success for wireless access solutions?
I wonder if the recent price declines have been brought about by the delays in CLEC purchases of equipment due to the standards dilemma? (but, should be fairly well known across the industry)
Another excerpt:
There is really no dilemma at all. The demand for faster Internet and Corporate LAN access exists today with devices and networks running at megabits per second being throttled by bottlenecked access circuits running two orders of magnitude slower. Equipment like AB-Access is available today at speeds and prices that open up significant SOHO markets. New service providers are spending hundreds of millions to deploy networks now. Market share is being claimed.
DMIC's Ensemble apparently was concerned that they would miss the window of CLEC rollout of wireless fixed access, but now are convinced that they will arrive just about the time the party gets going.
Speaking of DMIC, one of the things mentioned in passing in the conference call was that management was not sure how things were going to play out in broadband wireless due to the extreme flux in customer requirements--up to more demanding, I gathered. One good thing mentioned in the DMIC call was the explosion of demand--even though it applies to point to point uwave connections, it may be indicative of the level of interest in highbw connectivity. (A large part of the ptp interest was in the OC-3 area.)
The only other things that could account for this falloff (which I have taken advantage of...hopefully not the reverse) is a adverse court ruling (which would be public knowledge by now...news item), or the fact that 97% of the float is owned by institutions...and if any one of them decided to lighten up their ADAP holdings during the recent mkt declines by only a couple of percent, it could account for a fairly significant decline. |
