[Re:I thought that was one of the conditions of doing work with DT.]
Tell me if I'm wrong. Isn't Amati doing ADSL over ISDN lines in Germany? It's been so long since we discussed this, my memory is foggy. I thought that was one of the conditions of doing work with DT.
Your mind is foggy! Mine is made up of volatile DRAM, the last time I shut down, I lost all recall. Still trying to get my Archive back, Not giving up! All the information needed is in there. :-(
I beleive your right "I thought that was one of the conditions of doing work with DT."
Though I can't remeber the details either. I searched the WEB, my mail, what archive I have left, and can't find anything related.
I did find this in an old .Doc:
K.S. Jacobsen, P.S. Chow, T.N. Zogakis, J.M. Cioffi, M. Costa, and M.E. Britton. "Very High Bit Rate Digital Subscriber Lines (VDSL): An Effective Deployment Strategy for FTTC Utilizing the Existing
Copper Network". In Proceedings of VII International Workshop on Optical Access Networks, Nuremburg, Germany, September 1995.
I thought the following pertained to the discussion also.
JW@KSC
(snip)
From Aug 14th 97
DT WAKES UP
I guess it was about a year ago that I wrote a short Upgrade piece predicting that it would be the Germans who would first fail to meet the Maastricht numbers, and thus threaten the creation of the European Monetary Union. All of that is now well documented and accepted, although it seemed outrageous at the time.
Last week, the German government failed to pass Helmut Kohl's tax revision package; in blocking this legislation, the opposition Social Democrats bought a year in which to watch Kohl struggle against ever-tighter constraints in fulfilling his promise to "make the numbers" on time, while having fewer and fewer tools with which to do so.
Technology managers care about these little games because they have ugly side effects, like slowing one of the world's top technology markets.
One of the few gambits left to Helmut now is the continuing privatization of Deutsche Telekom, the state monopoly telecommunications firm which first offered some shares to the public earlier this year.
One suspects that, were one in top management at DT, one would have seen this writing on the wall for some time now, and have begun preparations for an inevitable shock as the business environment turned from monopolist to open competition on January 1, 1998, and from public to private throughout 1997.
Given that the German tech market is the largest market in Europe, and that telecommunications (and the Internet) are reluctantly becoming a driving force for general business as well as for technology companies, it might be worth noting the European context in which this drama is unfolding.
Europeans themselves are quite neutral on the idea of unification; this is a concept pushed from the top down, and from Germany out. Even in Germany, the population is increasingly restive as Deutschlanders realize that their own welfare state is in such poor shape that they will be forced to bring in the likes of Italy and other "Second Tier" European (currencies) on Round One, thereby weakening the Deutsche Mark (DM), which other Europeans are calling the Euro (and no, that was not a typo--).
Britain is out of this for the time being, which has given a temporary lift to the pound vs. almost all continental currencies, and the Northern countries are either out or increasingly looking to bolt.
In other words, That Leaves France. Their big idea of how make the EMU lovely is to stock it with little fish like Italy, and so dilute Germany's voting power. Unfortunately for the French people, their government's every move is now framed in anti-U.S. rhetoric and feeling. But because the Big Mac and Mickey Mouse are not their real enemies, they are running at night without a compass.
The election of Mssr. Jospin has further clouded the issue: for example, the privatization of France Telecom, already postponed for years, was again put off the weekend after his victory. Although rumors of a sale still circulate like the delicate aromas in a French kitchen, it is even more likely that some sleight-of-hand after-hours maneuvers will occur instead to make the books look right.
Specifically, it seems quite likely that FT and DT will exchange some (minority) shares. This accomplishes two goals: 1) It appears to reduce government debt for both France and Germany in one move, by simply re-entering new shares at a different line item in the budget; 2) it keeps control of the telecoms in pro-government hands; and 3) it creates an even larger pan-European telecom force.
Compelling, eh?
While this may act as a sop on the French side, however, I do not think it will be enough to prevent additional share sales on the DT side.
For all the above reasons, it has been interesting to notice that a number of quite unlikely announcements have been coming out of DT lately, spurred no doubt by these imminent changes.
The first was the announcement that DT was entering trials of Internet Telephony, which began about a month ago. At a time when many other players such as AT&T are secretly testing and preparing for the worst, DT is openly discussing using the Net for calling.
The dust had hardly settled on that move when Intel and DT announced an extension of Intel's ProShare videoconferencing license, with a likely move by DT to install a few thousand videoconferencing stations in real live offices. Hardly earthshaking on its own, but then came --
The August 6 announcement that DT would license Internet commerce store-creation software from Intershop (an eastern German firm now based in California); DT also takes a 7% equity position. The license may be worth $25MM over three years. The software will let DT customers "set up online stores, manage inventory, generate invoices and process commerce." I think they mean transactions.
The French press release on this (yes, there was one) touted the creation of "10,000 cyber-boutiques", while noting that currently I-Commerce is restricted to "cultural products" and "the American Continent." (And you thought I was kidding about the French, eh?)
Subscribers know that this is a large-scale, near-term opportunity (see SNS: The Future of Commerce). As if to underline the German assessment of I-Commerce, German software maker SAP struck its own deal with Intel last week, forming a new joint venture called Pandesic LLC. It appears that Pandesic will offer a "productized" version of SAP's R/3 (i.e., one that can be installed in less than 3 years), modified to run as a Net product.
What does it all mean?
It would seem that, for the most improbable of reasons, DT is waking up, and threatening to take FT -- and then the rest of Europe -- with it. Once the most unlikely to lead such a charge, DT is now the company to watch if you care about a resurgence in European tech markets.
Your comments are always welcome.
Sincerely,
Mark R. Anderson
President
Strategic News Service Tel. 360-378-3431
P.O. Box 1969 Fax. 360-378-7041
Friday Harbor, WA 98250 USA Email: sns@tapsns.com |
