Kachina,It seems to me that a lot more than a sweetheart deal had to have been proposed by Lucent in order for AT&T to breakoff evaluation. An excerpt from the Washington Post article regarding AT&T's test of Ciena's gear:
washingtonpost.com
"By all accounts, AT&T's year-long evaluation of Ciena's equipment went horribly. Ciena was plagued by numerous failures in its electronic components -- something that Nettles said had never before happened to the company.
"One thing that spooked Ciena engineers was that AT&T was testing their gear, as one put it, in "enemy territory." Though Lucent had been spun off from AT&T two years ago, AT&T still shares a huge laboratory facility with Lucent in Holmdel, N.J.
"AT&T and Lucent said they have strict rules separating their research activities. And while Ciena officials describe themselves as "concerned" that Lucent may have interfered with Ciena's evaluation, they declined to elaborate.
"'There were a lot of failures that were uncharacteristic of our past experiences,' said one Ciena engineer who worked on the AT&T evaluation, which began in November 1997. 'However, most of these are things we were really manufacturing for the very first time.'
"Meanwhile, Tellabs began talking with Ciena about a merger in February. Tellabs is a 24-year-old company that has built a solid business out of making equipment that helps phone companies manage their networks.
"The merger announcement in June was greeted enthusiastically by Wall Street. But behind the celebration of the planned marriage, Ciena officials were busy putting out a fire. Literally.
"Around midnight, two days before the merger was announced, an AT&T employee noticed smoke coming out of a Ciena power supply circuit board. Smoke or fire in a lab test is probably the worst thing that can happen to an AT&T vendor: AT&T officials still shiver when they recall Mother's Day 1988, when a fire swept through a phone switching facility in Hinsdale, Ill., knocking out service for weeks. Within days AT&T asked Ciena to remove its equipment.
"Ciena sent the board to a third-party testing facility, which cited faulty circuit construction as a probable but inconclusive cause. The incident did little to persuade AT&T that Ciena was capable of supporting its equipment at the scale AT&T needed.
"'Probably Ciena didn't respond as aggressively as they might have, or as we would have,' Birck said. 'You just have to take that kind of thing extremely seriously. You have to define the root cause. I don't think they did that.'
"In a merger document filed July 21, Ciena and Tellabs disclosed that AT&T had concluded it would be 'inadvisable' to deploy Ciena's 16-channel system. Without naming any vendor, AT&T said its capacity requirements had grown so much that it would explore other "commercially viable" higher-channel systems."
TTFN,
CTC |
