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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Drake who wrote (8813)	7/25/1999 8:31:00 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21876

Lucent's DWDM Box a Big Boy Toy; Could Spur Broadband Business Posted July 21, 1999 08:00 AM PDT At about $100,000 per building, Lucent's newest wireless DWDM system will be affordable only to carriers with large infrastructure budgets. Marketed under the name WaveStar OpticAir, the system is being tested by Global Crossing [GBLX] as an alternative to LMDS-based wireless systems. Though it could be used instead of LMDS, OpticAir "really has nothing to do with LMDS," says Ken Kelly, a senior analyst with San Jose-based Dataquest. "It is a metro DWDM." WaveStar shoots data at 2.5 Gbps, but that's just its introductory speed. It becomes commercially available in March 2000. Aside from the fact WaveStar is the first wireless system on the market to offer fiber speeds in the local loop, it works much like slower wireless data systems on the market. The system operates within a line of sight, meaning that if a laser beam linking two WaveStar units were blocked, a data connection would be terminated. WaveStar's performance is directly linked to the distance between two WaveStar boxes. The link can stretch as far as five kilometers (about 2 1/2 miles), but works best at distances of one kilometer (a half mile). A word of caution: the system could malfunction in bad weather, so studying rain tables is advisable before the installation is complete. In short, WaveStar OpticAir is as expensive as a regular fiber- optic DWDM connection, but much less reliable. So why use it? "It really fills the niche where there is no fiber," Bosco says. Also, OpticAir can actually save carriers money and time in terms of fiber construction and rights-of-way procurement. "[OpticAir] costs the same as what you pay for DWDM components," Kelly says. But because fiber installation expenses are avoided "there's savings there." One of the simplest deployments proposed for WaveStar is for connecting two offices across the street - by simply pointing the laser through the window. Lucent execs see a lot of interest toward the device in fiber- poor regions of the world such as Latin America. "I don't know of applications that won't work with this device," Bosco says. "You just wrap back-office applications around it to work with a degraded quality of the connection."