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To: E. Davies who wrote (11135)	6/12/1999 6:40:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Eric, thanks for the clarifications. Cable is never mentioned, as you note, perhaps because of Bell's embedded excitedness. Also, the targets in Bell's cross hairs are not the would be PON adopters, as much as they are, again, existing Excite customers, commercial users and ancillary appliance application users. "The company will extend many of these services to the work environment, where the percentage of high-speed Internet connectivity is highest. These services will accelerate and lower the cost of broadband adoption by exposing the millions of Excite narrowband users to the benefits of a media experience on a broadband platform." And like you say, @Work uses DSL, which could be used as a salient point for some other arguments. The implied strategy here is to get users at their business locations who are accustomed to dealing with Enterprise T1 speeds... get them accustomed to using the Excite@Home model, and to later leverage this look and feel which is afforded by greater speeds to induce them onto cablemodem at home. Something like that. ----- Correct, it is technically feasible to perform the outside plant upgrades. How financially viable this is, just after they've completed the original passes of HFC, while still saving face, is another story. ATHM will outgrow its present accommodations if they stay in line with their stated growth objectives. [How's that for planning?] They will need to have the MSOs bolster their outside plant in many regions of the country beyond the shortsighted provisions that now exist. This will cost to the tune of billions in additional upgrades in order to allow free and unobstructed passage and additional multimedia services. And maybe several more 6 MHz channels for ATHM's own use, as well as prying wider openings into the upstream tubes, while they are at it. That will require some tampering with the optical node optoelectronics, and hybrid-ing multiple 75-home block groups onto the return fiber optic part of the HFC back to the head end. I seem to recall an HLIT unit that does this rather well. What I'm referring to here is keeping the upstreams from each 75 home group separated, and upstreaming them via DWDM (75 at a time over each wavelength or even over dedicated RF groups) to the head end. That is doable too, but costly, compared to the status quo of grouping all of them at once, and doing nothing at all to improve the situation. Everything that you can fathom, or conceptualize within reasonable limits, is either readily doable and technically feasible in concept... but at what cost? And what does this do to the ROI model when you take a Scorched Earth approach, and yell into the wind, "damn the torpedoes"? While they're at it, the MSOs and CableLabs may as well start taking orders from the encroachers, and factor those in as well, while they are still forecasting their bandwidth expansion (re-segmenting and re-engineering) requirements. For, someone has to pay for these things... Regards, Frank Coluccio