Nikhil, You'll have to do a bit of research at Telechoice and on the High Bandwidth Website before you make any buying decisions, but I'm long on this technology and I think a few of these companies will do even better than Ascend has done in ISDN.
As the title of this thread suggests, there is a turf war ongoing between two forms of modulation--CAP (Westell and Paradyne are the main players) and DMT (Amati and Orckit are the leading pure plays in this camp). Some companies are positioned to go either way--Westell helped ADI and Aware develop a new version of DMT a few years back using wavelet technology, and they are developing DWMT products to enrich their product offering, and Orckit has come out with its own version of QAM (CAP was derived from this coax modulation by Paradyne).
There is also the question of what kind of DSL the market will demand in the beginning. Will it choose the less expensive SDSLs (Symmetrical DSL) and HDSLs (High-bit DSL) simply to clear the Internet access bottleneck and provide fair quality teleconferencing/video telephony? Or will there be an immediate market for video on demand, requiring ADSL (Asymmetrical DSL)? The CAP camp (including PairGain) is better prepared for the first scenario. The DMT camp for the second.
The competition from wireless modems and cable modems you'll also have to assess. Basically, they do not have sufficient upstream for the killer application in DSL--video telephony. They are also less secure (very important for business, military, and even personal use) and their initially impressive downstream diminishes in proportion to the number of users in a cell/on a cable line. Both these options have hidden costs and will be much more expensive than DSL.
These are a few things you'll have to think about while making your decision. With the present correction, this is a good time to buy. New IPOs coming up for Aware (developer of DWMT and a video compression specialist) and Orckit (a very innovative and aggressive Israeli company, the only one so far with a trialing VDSL, Very high-bit Digital Subscriber Line, the fastest of all the DSLs).
There will be more and more DSL news from this point onward, so I expect these stocks to do very well (those that have the most news). When actual orders from telcos and ISPs start rolling in--in late summer or the fall--I think they will take off (again, those that get orders).
Dave |
