AT&T buys minority stakes in 3Com/Fore/Newbridge.
[Sorry, just a fantasy from a Forbes writer. :-)
Brother Lawrence will have nightmare just daydreaming about this.
Go to the Forbes site and see the 11/3 article on telecombination: Ascend buys Bay, Lucent buys Bascend, etc.
BTW, there's nothing newsworthy in the recent thestreet.com 'interview' with Benhamou, the same old things repeated: inventory, pricing, competition,...]
Excerpt from Forbes:
This is a bit more scary than the Bay/Ascend combination. It brings the best brand name in the telecommunications world to the most widely distributed product line in the networking universe: every kind of gear to connect to the network (data, voice, video), the intermediary steps to get to the big networks (switches, remote access), and the world's biggest backbone network itself. This lets the giant telecom company move its tentacles out throughout the enterprise, tie into the switching revolution as a way to bypass routers, promote ATM in the manner it needs to succeed, and feed all that traffic into its massive, already built ATM-powered superhighway. Economies of scale make it economically feasible to have an enormous network, and this lets AT&T go hard after the telecommunications consulting business as the preeminent supplier. (Same as IBM's recent strategy on the computer side.)
OK. When the dust has settled, who'll be left? Basically there is Shiva, with a decent but troubled remote access business, and Cabletron, with a core hub business, with some switiching, for the enterprise. Together they might make a poor man's version of the Ascend/Bay merger, and the natural partner would be Nortel--but this is an also ran. Mitel, or Siemens, the other big voice gear makers might want to get into the action as well. Beyond that, the telcos and carriers don't have much reason to buy hardware. It is better for them to stay unaffiliated and play vendors off against one another. |
