Hi Jim,
Where have you been? I figured you must have taken one of those rockets for a ride. Next flight to Mars?
We miss your expertise on some of these DSL threads as DSL finally rolls out -- though I'm still am at 56K. You'd have to put up with some real insulting and lowlife comments from some very aggressive shorts, however.
WSTL is finally selling CPE hand-over-fist, but the shorts seem to like WSTL especially and attack it mercilessly -- inspite of a 5166% increase in CPE over last year. Pat seems to prefer EFNT which I have a small stake in which is also going gangbusters.
My biggest enthusiasm is for VRTA, (Pat is there too), which is doing spectacularly and seems to be going into every DSL device -- though I don't know quite how they grabbed the market so effectively. They are doing the software and fabless hardware developments for OEMs. Their Helium chip is fabricated by LSI and their new Magnesium chip utilizes TI's C54x DSPs with VRTA's vCore software, i.e. they are not using the TI/Amati solution as I see it. It surprised me. I wonder why? I actually hear little about the TI/Amati solution and ADI seemed to dismiss them as a major player by an answer to a question at ADI's last conference call.
ADI, which unfortuately I don't own, had an earnings call that showed the escalation in DSL. According to them Korea is the country most rapidly deploying DSL -- over 2 million lines this year alone and ADI has 90% of that market! They say their only competition is Alcatel -- they don't see anyone else on the CO side. (There are rumors that Alcatel may now be looking to exit the ADSL chip making arena for CPE because their costs are too high and concentrate on CO only). From their perspective TI/Amati was simply not in the running in the CO. They claim the announcements are just that -- announcements. I found that very disappointing. The following day, however, there was a news release indicating that Deutsche Telekom had recently procured as many as 2 million ADSL modems from Siemens, which in turn is using a Texas Instruments PHY and a Virata network processor in every modem. Again this is on the CPE side.
The DSL story gets more and more complex, but deployment is finally underway. You should provide us with your insights and support from time to time.
All the best,
Michael |
