This is what is happening at NT:
"A Death Foretold"
George Gilder,02.21.00
Last year was the biggest sales year ever for SONET, the synchronous optical network hardware used for routing voice and data packets over the telco's extensive fiber-optic
networks.A.D. 2000 likely will be even better, and the market may grow to $10 billion...right before it collapses. Like the final supernova of a brilliant star,
SONET will blow up to thousands of times its original brightness--just before it caves in on itself to a dark, silent death. And like the resulting black hole, SONET can suck companies as large as Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks, Lucent and AT&T, and as fashionable as AMCC and PMC-Sierra, into its downward spiral, unless they commit fully to the new world--the all-optical network."
Most of NT's problems are from their legacy SONET customers, not Optical.The recent news from CSCO, Nortel, PMC-Sierra and Lucent in my opinion confirm the very trend that Gilder forecasted.
Ultimately I see this not as the death of networking, but the death of SONET based networking. Out of this morass will rise the all optical networkers and component makers such as JDS-Uniphase, Avanex, and Corning. The whole networking group is being shot with this Nortel news, yet interestingly enough if one reads Nortel's words, their problem is in SONET and with legacy based Telcos, not the all-optical area. Thus the opportunity I see that the market does not by not distinguishing between optical and SONET based companies. |
