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Technology Stocks : California Amplifier - 2 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hiram Walker who wrote (1664)	6/13/1999 12:40:00 AM
From: Hiram Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2267

Articles of interest, telecoms-mag.com AT&T's acquisition of cable companies TCI and MediaOne has prompted other IXCs to either ally with RBOCs or gobble up BWAPs. Sprint has acquired American Telecasting for its expertise and spectrum licenses, while MCI WorldCom has invested in a leading 2.5-GHz multipoint, multichannel distribution service (MMDS) telco, SpeedChoice, to gain access to the metro market. Capital investment is key because LMDS is still unproven. Lucent, Nortel, and Hughes have committed billions of dollars in vendor financing for the major licensees. But it is telling that these providers are not locked into using the sponsoring vendor's equipment if something better comes along, leaving the door open for a non-LMDS wireless solution. LMDS may offer more total bandwidth than the 24-GHz band, but non-LMDS providers have a number of selling points: Most non-LMDS licenses were obtained at little cost; telecoms-mag.com Providers are not regulated as local telcos. Digital microwave is less costly than fiber in many situations. The cost trade-off is between the fixed cost of constructing microwave towers and the per-mile cost of installing fiber cable. Digital microwave is usually cheaper than fiber for point-to-point paths of greater than three miles. Point-to-multipoint services are also cheaper than fiber where street congestion, environmental restrictions on trenching or intransigent ILECs are present. Digital microwave's availability advantage may seem surprising to those of us old enough to remember Sprint's TV commercials that featured the dynamiting of microwave towers. Modern digital microwave systems incorporate sophisticated digital signal processing and error correction schemes that did not exist a decade ago when microwave was clearly inferior to fiber. Today, digital microwave enjoys an availability advantage over fiber. The biggest threat to fiber availability is the cable cut. On average, buried fiber cable installations experience a cut every 0.013 miles each year. The mean time to repair a fiber cut is 12 hours. This means that a 15-mile fiber optic cable run will experience an average outage of 2.3 hours per year. The biggest threat to digital microwave is multipath fading--an atmospheric phenomenon caused by microwave signals being reflected by low cloud layers. This results in an average outage of 233 seconds per year on a 15-mile digital microwave path where modern error correction schemes are employed. In summary, digital microwave really can appear to be like fiber. It can operate at up to OC-3 speeds with error-free or nearly error-free performance. It has better availability than fiber and generally costs less to build. However, if you are looking for Gbps or better data rates, digital microwave is clearly not like fiber. Scarcity of radio frequency spectrum and the laws of physics mandate an OC-3 speed limit. But, there are many WAN applications where OC-3 speeds are attractive. For example, T1 lines are widely used for network access in medium to large business establishments: The lower cost basis of digital microwave could make a 10-Mbps service feasible at T1 prices. Furthermore, Fast Ethernet still makes sense on many enterprise network backbones. Digital microwave might make sense in tying large campuses or city-wide enterprises together (e.g., education institutions, health care networks, retail banks). In addition, there are many places where environmental obstacles or demographics make fiber cable trenching either physically or economically infeasible. In these bandwidth-starved locations a mere 155 Mbps will look like a feast. Hiram