Hi Dave, re: First Call report... thanks for the tip and here is some of the more relevant points from the report:
Deutsche Morgan Grenfell/CJL
... talks about RBOCs and Cable companies being ill suited for readical change of their network designs to introduce new services...
... they prefer a more measured approach to the future that provides sufficiant time for them to transition their organizational structures, cultures, and network architectures to capture emerging opportunities...
...They have been and still are bullish on ADSL prospects... discusses how the Bells like the idea because of the hundreds of billions they have invested into the copper infrastructure.... during the last several months ADSL has gained momentum... Announced ADSL trials include GTE, USW, BA. They expect additional trial announcements in the near future.... They think ADSL is better than ISDN because it's much faster plus ...substantially reduced requirement to recondition existing copper plant to improve the service quality.
... then they compare where ADSL is today to where ATM was 18 months ago, and say how the early leaders of ATM (GDC, BBN etc.) have stumbled..."We are currently experiencing the same type of sitution in ADSL with the stocks of early leaders such as WSTL and Amati correcting sharply from their highs. At this time it is extremely difficult to forcast which companies will emerge as the ultimate winners in ADSL."... then talks about the uncertainty because of CAP vs DMT standard issues...competitive environment will become increasingly intense as the technology matures during the next 18 months... "In fact, the eventual winner may not be among the current market leaders."
Then they talk about how the ADSL deployment would spark significant capacity upgrades to carrier netwok backbones.... a broadband overlay switch infrastructure will be required most likely ATM... Transmission technologies such as wave division multiplexing (WDM) will gain momentum to meet this requirement... (Dr. Hank Z... are you listening?)... WDM more than doubles the capacity of existing fiber optic links...
Then they quote Grove's negative views on cable modems... and go into a not too positive discussion on cable modems & cable industry... basically they say that it's life or death for cable industry and this is reflected in their depressed stock... we expect the industry to begin to roll out commercial service & to make significant progress in cable modem standards during the next 6-9 months... Inital deployments in Canada have been more positive because network infrastructure is more modern... The per subscriber data rates for the service (Rogers' WAVE) have been in the range of several hundred kilobits per second. But they expect one change to the industry's strategy... local caching and replication technicques used today may prove too complex to widely implement...
On ISDN...
will be a niche market... by the time configuration & installation is simplified ADSL will be here...
Telcos will continue to postpone widespread HFC and SDV builds...
a good benchmarke is Pacific Bell's decision to scale back its HFC deployment until it acn prove in a $50 per access line per year cost savings benefit from the network's installation. "Quite simply, the cost is too high and the uncertainty regarding the payback period on the investment too large to justify the deployment. Moreover, the emergence of xDSL technologies lessens the near-term need for SDV architectures. When the industry ultimately chooses a solution we expect SDV will be the technology of choice given its similarity to current telco network architectures, its more flexible design, and evolutionary upgrade approach relative to HFC." |
