[Conference call]
First of all I have a crisis: whether to see Ricky Lee Jones or do a full report on the conference call. Having given it 5 secs of serious consideration, I'm opting for Ricky. :)) Love her strange, wistful sound and been-around-the-block lyrics.
And now to the call (who says I don't have my priorities in order????)
Two different markets for ADSL: Outside US it's VOD and direct broadcast, needing 6 to 8Mbps; inside US it's Internet/data needing 2Mbps at outset, moving up from there.
Trials going well. No major technical issues. Only challenge is getting specific features built in when requested. The engineers have the biggest hurdles.
CopperGold -- "some time this summer. . . next few weeks. . . few months after that, product will be available commercially."
TI --- "Shipping October 9." The Discrete analog portion will be available in August. Space and density issues have been solved.
GTE: They're tight-lipped about plans. They're putting CLEC in place. We add to Microsoft trial almost weekly. Some feel deployment announcement will come this summer in July or August. We continue to supply equipment. They continually ask for feature enhancements. We'll be one of the players. They're putting everything in place they need for deployment: training, standardizing pricing, marketing issues. Only modems there now are Westell's and ours. Would be difficult for new vendors. Takes 6 to 9 months to go through standardizing process [GTE's.
Manufacturing: "not an issue." Suppliers are here in the valley. Cisco, for example, outsources all board development. We have ICOT/IBM business and will use vendors. RBOCs give 3 to 6 months lead on orders. We can ramp up quickly.
Products: We feel good about performance. We have best performance in the world. Last January Westell and Amati were the only ones in field trials. More recently I've seen Orckit. [Their product] works. It's an expensive product. Aware says they have product to ship. I haven't seen it. ADI will have something out soon.
DMT vs. CAP: battles are over. 5 RBOCs, GTE, and most Internat'l vendors have picked DMT. Only BA/Nynex will CAP. Reason? Clearly it's performance. Better reach, and better performance. Now cost/size/power are issues.
Shipped Allegro to 20 different customers, majority of these have stand-alone modems already. We're continually adding to our products. On the network management side, we're up to OC3/12 kind of technology, shippable today. Need ATM/frame relay/ and optical interfaces.
Oops, gotta run. More later tonight.
Cheers!
Pat |
