Pat ,It's too bad the institutional holders won't release their positions sooner.
I have inquired @ Fidelity before. They are no help at all.
They must be afraid someone will get the jump on them.
Have you seen this one? & Do you know if Amati has anything to do with MOT or NEC Cable Modems as it relates to their bottom line?
I've not seen HP mentioned before in modems. Do you know where they fit.
Don't go to any trouble, I was curious if HP is relevent in the Amati equation.
Thanks Pat
&
Happy NEWS Year
Ray
December 23, 1996, Issue:1038
Section: News
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U.S. Manufacturers Facing Rival Cable-Modem Specs
By Jack Robertson
Anaheim, Calif. - An emerging schism in the global cable-modem market could affect U.S. suppliers, according to vendors who attended the cable industry's recent Western Show here.
European and Asian electronics companies hoping to dominate their domestic markets are expected to rally around a proposed IEEE 802.14 cable-modem standard, while U.S. vendors will back a rival multimedia cable network system (MCNS) modem specification that has been drafted by Cable Laboratories, the U.S. industry's technical organization based in Louisville, Colo.
Bill Hahn, operations manager of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s interactive broadband products, Santa Clara, Calif., said the rival cable-modem standards follow two different network packet protocols. MCNS is based on the interface protocol used by almost all U.S. cable operators, while the IEEE 802.14 is based on ATM protocols.
"There is far greater interest in Europe and many Asian countries in using direct broadcast satellites as the broadband link to PCs, and ATM is ideally suited for this market," Hahn said. "I look for broadband modem manufacturers in these areas to use the IEEE standard."
The foreign companies, latecomers to the field, hope to use the IEEE standard as leverage to enter their domestic markets against a host of U.S. cable-modem suppliers already selling hundreds of thousands of units, exhibitors at the Western Show said.
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Motorola Inc., for example, is selling its CyberSurf modems to the leading cable operator in Norway, and it has won approval from China to sell the devices there. Hewlett-Packard has announced major orders from four Japanese cable TV networks. And a Japanese trading company, Sumitomo Corp., has made a $5 million minority equity investment in cable-modem newcomer Terayon Corp., Santa Clara, and will market Terayon modems in Japan.
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Cable Laboratories' MCNS specification, which was unveiled at the Western Show, is too new to have any immediate effect. Cable operators who can't wait for final adoption of the MCNS spec are ordering cable modems already on the market.
"The major concern of cable companies is how they can transition from the cable modems they are buying today to new MCNS modems in the future," said James Phillips, vice president of Motorola's multimedia division, Arlington Heights, Ill.
Virtually all vendors are rushing to lock in their existing modems with cable operators, hoping customers will simply upgrade within the line to MCNS devices when available.
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The Western Show resembled a land rush, with a host of companies exhibiting cable modems for the first time, including NEC Electronics Inc. and Toshiba Corp. of Japan and several U.S. cable network infrastructure suppliers such as ICTV Inc., Los Gatos, Calif.; Phasecom Inc., Cupertino, Calif.; Terayon; and WorldGate Communications, Trevose, Pa.
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Also, Rousbeh Yassini, founder and former chief executive of LANCity, resigned last week as vice president and general manager of Santa Clara-based Bay Networks' cable-modem division, which bought LANCity, Andover, Mass., six months ago and integrated the operation into its network business. Yassini resigned only a week after participating in a presentation at the Western Show.
Copyright r 1996 CMP Media Inc.
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