Greg:
You may wish to consult the article entitled
''Going the distance'' by Michael Weingarten
and Bart Stuck, which appeared in the June 1, 1998
issue of Telephony Magazine at:
internettelephony.com
You will need to hit the archives button. Somehow,
I cannot give you a direct link, since it is a site
where articles appear in frames within frames.
The bottom line: all CLECS have some identical fixed
infrastructure costs, such as switches. However,
once this is taken care of, wireless CLECs have
a huge deployment cost advantage over fiber-based
CLECs. In fact. fiber CLECs can only reach economically
a very small percentage of office buildings in the US, while
the deployment cost for wireless is about $20K/building
with point to point technology, and $4K with point to
multipoint technology.
So, as a general rule wireless CLECs and fiber-based CLECS
are not truly comparable. Wireless CLECs include WCII,
TGNT, and ARTT. Fiber CLECS include ICGX, ICIX, MCLD,
HYPT, ELIX, GSTX, ESPI, and RCNC among others. NXLK
is now a member of both groups.
There exists other differences explaining different
valuations: a) cost of capital and whether financing
for the entire buildout is already secured, b) percentage
of resale activity, and c) target market (most CLECS
are aimed at businesses, but RCNC targets the residential
market). Also some CLECs are purely local, while others
aim at building an end to end local and long-distance
network (strategy of WCII, NXLK, and GSTX).
So, there are lots of subtle differences between CLECs
which explain different valuations. Besides WCII, I think
NXLK is also interesting, but probably not at the current
price.
Regards,
Bernard Levy |
