The other bad news that may have affected the stock today:
US West cancels IDSL program
ttp://www4.zdnet.com/intweek/daily/970909f.html
U S West !nterprise Fails To Deliver On DSL
By Paula Bernier
1:30 PM EDT
EXCLUSIVE
U S West !nterprise Networking Services' big plans to offer widespread Digital Subscriber Line services to businesses in 14 cities has not materialized, Inter@ctive Week has learned. The unregulated data subsidiary of U S West Communications said in January (Inter@ctive Week, Jan. 27, page 1) that it was offering two flavors of Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL) service in 14 cities within its 14-state operating region: Integrated Services Digital Network DSL (IDSL), which operates at 128 kilobits per second, the same rate as Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) technology; and High-Speed DSL (HDSL), which operates at 1.5 megabits per second.
But !nterprise has not rolled out either service on a commercial basis to date, and it has dropped plans to install IDSL equipment, according to Greg Gum, executive director of the company's megabit services. !nterprise now plans to begin commercial rollout of HDSL services beginning in the fourth quarter, Gum said. Instead of using the two xDSL technologies, !nterprise now plans to offer a range of data rates, from 64 Kbps to 768 Kbps, over single-line HDSL (SHDSL) systems based on Cisco Systems Inc. and PairGain Technologies Inc. equipment, Gum said.
Ascend Communications Inc. was to have provided the IDSL equipment to !nterprise. But a lack of customer interest in IDSL, the added costs of managing two xDSL systems and the lack of available IDSL equipment
contributed to the decision to drop the IDSL option, Gum said. According to !nterprise spokesman Jeremy Story, the decisions to scale back were made this spring after President Jerry Parrick left the company and his replacement, Joe Zell, a long-time U S West employee, re-evaluated the xDSL plans.
The company now intends to focus on deploying HDSL technology to just a few cities. "We're looking at two cities this year, perhaps a third depending on timing," Gum said. Market tests indicated that rolling out HDSL in a "sporadic fashion with limited coverage in cities tends to be a detriment to [penetration] rates," he added. That's because the two key applications for the service are high-speed Internet access and remote local area network connections for telework. Many of the companies !nterprise is targeting the service at want to be able to offer HDSL service to multiple employees, which are spread out across a city and are therefore served by various central offices, according to Gum. !nterprise's first HDSL customer will be the Davis County School District in Utah, whose current "couple 100 line" test system will go live within a month.
In related news, Next Level Communications Inc. announced that U S West Communications Inc., the regulated telephone business of U S West, has committed to purchase equipment that would allow it to support 450,000 digital subscriber lines.
Carl |
