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Technology Stocks : Newbridge Networks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zbyslaw owczarczyk who wrote (12067)	6/29/1999 3:13:00 AM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 18016

From EETimes: June 28, 1999, Issue: 1067 Section: News -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Startups lead LMDS technology shakeout Loring Wirbel Vancouver, B.C. - Just as Wi-LAN Inc. is rolling out a new technology for broadband wireless local loops, the companies backing an existing approach for such metropolitan networks-Local Multipoint Distribution Service-is undergoing a wave of corporate shifts. Newbridge Networks Inc. (Kanata, Ontario) announced last week a bid to acquire the LMDS business of Stanford Telecommunications Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) in a total $490 million deal. Newbridge is interested only in Stanford's broadband wireless LMDS business, and the deal is contingent on Stanford selling other business units in the defense and semiconductor sectors. For the deal to go through, Stanford must pay Newbridge at least $210 million for the business units that are sold. That gambit follows the recent move by Bosch Telecom Inc. to sell the former LMDS business of Texas Instruments Inc. to a team of Motorola and Cisco Systems. Meanwhile, at the recent Supercomm trade show, Bellevue, Wash., startup Wavtrace Inc. announced it would partner with Harris Corp. (Melbourne, Fla.), seeking the larger point-to-point radio specialist's help in sales channels to get the Wavtrace time-division duplexed LMDS system to a larger audience (see Feb. 15, page 1). For its part, Ensemble Communications Inc. (San Diego) has launched a full suite of TDD-based LMDS access equipment called Adaptix. The company claimed burst rates of up to 120 Mbits/second for its Adaptix access network. At a recent panel discussion on broadband wireless access at the International Conference on Communications here, Eric Barnhart of the Georgia Tech Research Institute said the real issue for successful deployment of LMDS revolved around the types of carriers promoting it and the types of initial users adopting it-not on manufacturing clout. Residential markets are not the first likely targets, because the cost of radio components has not dropped enough to justify such applications, Barnhart said. Instead, the same apartment house and campus complex markets that many digital-subscriber-line developers find so attractive should be leveraged by the early entrants in LMDS. In some cases, large enterprises might even consider private broadband wireless networks rather than licensed LMDS services, he said. The $500 lines Barnhart predicted that use of wireless local loops for data would explode when deployment costs dip below $500 a line. LMDS may follow similar patterns, he said. Yet, Barnhart thinks WLL should not be considered a form of broadband radio, because access speeds usually are less than 500 kbits/s-though that assumption could be shaken by the Wi-LAN announcement of 30-Mbit/s rates. Also at that panel, John Skoro, marketing director for broadband wireless access at Nortel, said cellular and telco carriers, and even cable-TV multisystem operators, could choose LMDS to augment or even replace systems based on cable modems or xDSL. >>>>>> Note market size: techweb.com