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Technology Stocks : (LVLT) - Level 3 Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kevin G. O'Neill who wrote (2138)	7/28/1999 12:28:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3873

Kevin, the significance of this announcement is greater than meets the eye. I think that it makes a statement concerning the vendor wars taking place in the top tiers. CSCO who historically has been indentified with the IP model has lost some big ground here, while the two vendors most often thought of as legacy providers have won big time. LVLT has made a statement about how they will address their convergence strategy, bridging the older PSTN model with the coming of what they say will become their all IP environment. What they have said, in effect, is that they will deal with vendors who are most accustomed to providing scalable public network infrastructures similar to those which have been provided to the ILECs and IXC, as opposed to vendors whose products are still very much identified with enterprise level fabrics. Earlier last month they went with LU's softswitch for VoIP, and now with NT for their ultimate optical platform. I suspect that CSCO will pick up much of the remaining enterprise level IP stuff (that which LVLT will make available in the way of VPNs, etc.) but this is a far cry from what I would have expected earlier at their own infrastructure level, when I perceived that Crowe's IP assertions might have led him to weight CSCO more favorably. In contrast they could have just as easily gone with CSCO for the VoIP component and one of CSCO's emerging partners (Corvis, Monterey, and others) in the optical space who are being funded in part, and I suspect groomed at the same time to some degree, by CSCO, but they went with two traditional switch providers in each case, instead. This strikes me as interesting. Would you agree? Regards, Frank Coluccio