J, From what I understand, the RFP was sent out to about 40 companies and not all of them have products right now. It talks about 60,000 lines in '97 and requires more than a single source.
If we assume that cost, real-estate, power consumption and time to market would be the main considerations along with a complete manageable system (NOS etc), I don't think AMTX can get any of it without partnering with another player. First of all, CP isn't supposed to be ready until 1Q the earliest and we aren't sure MOT will make that date. Even if we assume Amati has gone to LSI and contracted them to make the chipset as a second source, they may still have 1 source for the chipset if CP isn't ready until mid '97. The telcos may not care about current commercial status, but if you can't demonstrate you would have the solution ready for trials late this year so it can be ready for deployment in '97, they won't go for it.
By the way, I understand Lucent is now making the transceivers for Paradyne which intends to market it's own ADSL products.
USRX has a great deal of expertise in DSP. Remember what they said back in the spring about 'it will take us no more than 6 months to bring a product to market'? Anyhow, if we assume they have started working on it they may surprise us all. We know for sure ASND has been working on it since spring and neither one of these 2 have made an attempt to buy a company so far, nor have they made a product announcement. But that doesn't mean they aren't working on it.
Look at what Cisco has done to this business. They been adding every money making technology to their product portfolio mostly through acquisitions. I would expect them to enter the ADSL market as well. In the spring CSCO was talking about building Gigabit Ethernet technology in-house, today they announced the acquisition of Granite. I guess they looked at the project timeframes & time to market issues and decided to buy instead of build. So, some of the bigger players may buy to get a head start. My question is if buying was the approach they would take, why didn't they go after Aware or Orckit prior to the IPOs? |
