<<Thanks for talking to me...>>
Thank YOU for talking to me. I'm the "foreigner" from the ASND thread.
First I want to say that I am neither long nor short NT and long ASND.
My reasons for asking a few questions over here, are two-fold.
1) For months rumors about ASND being acquired have been popping up.
Several companies have been named and others speculated on. NT is one
of the speculated one. Therefore I want to learn more of NT.
2) I want to gauge ASND products against another company with
networking products to see how they stack up - and I also want to
learn more of NT products.
I hope my posts don't appear "debative" as that is really not my
intent. My intent is to learn - and I think my questions and answers
will benefit the NT thread as well.
That said, now to respond to your post.
<<That press release sounds very impressive, as do all press releases
(this applies to NT and NN too, obviously). It's obvious that I need to
learn more about the technical details and acronyms in order to spot
what's important and what's noise. But it sounds big!>>
I posted several - which one specifically were you referring to, the GX-550?
<<Regarding voice - I especially meant voice over ATM, but that news about ASND
starting to put voice capabilities into their MAX lineup, then frame relay later (with no
mention of ATM) kind of emphasizes their lack of experience compared to say Nortel
or Lucent or Siemens. I wonder if they really can live up to the strict reliability
standards most carriers are going to demand before they trust their precious voice
networks to ATM. It's only annoying when your web connection drops. How about
911 being shut down for hours? Nortel and LU have been performing at that level for
decades....that experience is bound to count for something. What good is an OC-48
connection if the big customers can't trust it to be up 99.99999% of the time? I think
Nortel definitely has an edge in RBOC, Sprint, etc business in this respect. And I think
that's why Newbridge partnered with Siemens.>>
No question voice is an ASND weakspot - and one they need to
dramatically strengthen quickly. They have stated they will have it,
but I don't know much else about it at this time. A few months back
there was a rumor about ASND and ANET (a VoFR and VoIP company), but
that quickly died down. I think all three forms of voice will be
important. In what priority order would you place them, in the RAS
space, the WAN space and the LAN space?
<<Re: Quality - both Ascend and Cascade seemed to have the "low-cost,
get the box out the door, bugs n' all" kind of reputation. The MAX TNT
is just one big enough to make the news. I'm positive other people
will violently disagree with this - I'm just saying what I've been
hearing. And maybe it's not even a bad thing in the cutthroat ISP market.>>
Yes, we carry a bit of that baggage. ASND was always a "heavy operations",
fast to market kind of company. The CEO has an operations background.
As technology has become more sophisticated, there are many more "bugs"
to find and fix. ASND has shown signs of being "bitten", with MAX TNT
software problems and 56K issues, as well as boxes running hot, etc.
ASND appears to have waked up to this problem. After spending all Summer
chasing these problems, and watching their stock careen all over the
place. In their recent Q3 Conference Call, they indicated they were
moving to increase R&D spending from 10-12% to 13-14%, which should
go a long way to solving these types of problems first and help
correct this image later.
<<Re: NTT - I think the majority of the contract is for frame relay
(this is starting to sound like my debate with Glenn!<g>)>>
It does sound that way, as they list 150 big CSCC swwitches but don't
give a quantity for the ATM switches.
<<Re: network management software - I am the wrong guy to try and compare
this stuff. What I've heard emphasized is "the same software manages the
WHOLE network". Does anybody achieve this? I sure as heck don't know!
Have heard nice comments about NN's software from non-NN-mouthpieces though.
I read a really good white paper outlining NN/Siemen's MainStreet Xpress
carrier ATM strategy. Even I could understand it! (Maybe that's not a good
thing...<G>) I'm getting to know Magellan now, and soon I'll move on to
ASND and CSCO. >>
I don't know a lot about this area either. What we need is for a
heavy technical type to join in with some information on this.
<<In the meantime, please forgive me if I continue to say wildly crazy
things about ATM.>>
No, thats fine, I want to learn too.
<<Look what I found out from you about ASND by doing that!>>
And I have learned some things about NT too - you DO have a
Power Network, don't you? <G>
<<Thanks for talking to me...>>
Thanks again as well. |
