Major News:. UBS Reports BT Taps Alcatel, Fujitsu, Westell for 10,000-20,000 Line ADSL Deployment Starting in Late 1997; Nortel Loses Bid
January 23, 1997 -- UBS Securities' Nikos Theodosopoulos published to First Call this morning an extensive statement claiming that BT will announce shortly that Alcatel and Fujitsu have won the bid for a 10,000-20,000 line ADSL contract. Deployment is slated to begin in late 1997 and continue into 1998. BT expects to top 1 million lines within 3-5 years, according to Theodosopoulos.
Nortel, an early rumored leader in the bid, lost out because it was unwilling to take on part of the service launch risk; see, the BT contract is expected to be more of a joint venture than an outright order. BT has said in the past that it wanted a dual vendor arrangement.
Nikos says that Alcatel will supply the DMT ADSL modems and the DSLAM, while Fujitsu will supply Westell's CAP modems and Westell's DSLAM.
Despite the UBS statement, TeleChoice feels that any announcement from BT is not coming anytime soon. There are still a lot of technical and other details to be worked out, from what we understand, and the exact final makeup of the BT supplier team is still not totally clear. (As Nikos reported, the backbone networking issue is probably still up in the air, for instance). While the Alcatel/Fujitsu/Westell team may indeed be the final winners of the contract, there are likely other parties involved as well that have not been announced.
For More Info: UBS Securities Report
MAJOR NEWS: Bell Atlantic Takes Turn At ADSL Plate
January 23, 1997 -- First it was Pacific Bell reacting to the U S WEST announcement. Now Bell Atlantic has stepped up to the plate, with Bell Atlantic CEO Ray Smith saying in a speech that it will begin a market test of ADSL in its region within six weeks and move to a rollout in a major metropolitan area by this fall. Smith did not say exactly where the trial will take place, but listed Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington as likely targets.
Smith reportedly said the fall deployment will take place in Philadelphia, Washington, or Boston -- NYNEX territory. Smith labeled 1997 "the Year of ADSL," according to CNET's coverage of the speech.
"The first [strategy Bell Atlantic has] is to invest in infrastructure - and for us that means building variable broadband digital networks. Bell Atlantic is now building the "enabler" - the serving platform for advanced information, entertainment and communications: the distribution system, we hope, for the information economy. Now, what does this mean -- how far along will we be, say, by the end of 1997? By the end of the year, we will have:
Digitized our entire switching switching structure; Put network intelligence and common channel signaling in every one of our switches; Installed 2.8 million miles of fiber - more than any of our peers; Offered ISDN everywhere in our region, selling more residential ISDN than most of the rest of the country; Digitized our cellular network (more than 55M POPs); Introduced xDSL technologies - "ISDN on steroids": connections up to 6 Mbps over conventional copper networks, switched, dedicated, reliable; And gotten our first customer on a switched digital broadband full service network, providing 52 Mbps of dedicated connectivity and transport for any form of digital cargo: voice, data, and video. Just in time for high capacity network PCs."
Smith is still bullish on ISDN: "We put a lot of money into it, so it will have a life of his own. It will be part of a family of [high-speed Internet access] systems," according to CNET. ADSL is far easier to work with than ISDN, he said, because it is easier to install, configure, and sell.
Interestingly, Smith talked about other RBOC plans: Ameritech will roll out ADSL in Chicago and that Southwestern Bell will offer the service in San Antonio.
For More Info:
Ray Smith: Upside Magazine's Technology Summit, January 21, 1997, "Looking Into the Crystal Ball"
Ooops:. AT&T Frame Relay Net Crashes, Taking Site Down
Presumably you tried to get on our site yesterday; well, so did we. And onto all of our internal Internet accessible servers. AT&T decided that yesterday, of all days, was the day it chose to crash its frame relay net. We were told some 25 nodes went down, taking Internet connectivity to www.telechoice.com/xdslnewz/ down with it. What are you going to do? We are sorry for the lead up to the 12:00 release -- that time was set by U S WEST !NTERPRISE and changed twice over the prior two days, so we were not stringing you along. We are setting up a mirror site so this won't happen again. Our apologies.-Danny, Kieran, Christine, Beth, Liza, Sandy, Regis, et al. |
