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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lml who wrote (13785)	8/9/1999 5:04:00 AM
From: tom offenbach	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

I find it interesting that nobody has brought up the fact that ATHM has built regional datacenters(RDC's) in the MSO facilities. In these RDC's, ATHM owns, manages and supports the equipment: routers(connecting the cable infrastructure together and facilitating IP connectivity to other networks), proxies(facilitating low latency connections for 'popular' sites and applications), HA web servers of their own and @Media partners(enabling content providers to place their data directly on the @Home Network providing a low latency platform for the delivery of bandwidth intensive applications and content). This is ATHM shareholders trump card because overtime, access revenues will diminish while service revs from application enabling, servicing and support will grow. I don't doubt T wants to get rid of the XCIT properties. They'll probably 'trade/sell' the XCIT portal to AOL, do the same with World Net service and refocus ATHM into a facilities provider that services both ISP's and telcos. Think about it from a risk management perspective on the part of T. The open access issue will keep downward pressure on both T and ATHM. By making ATHM a facilities provider that facilitates last mile connectivity for other ISP's, they've overcome the open access issue and in the process unloaded a large liability(XCIT expenses) while opening the door to supplying AOL's 18M customers with long distance and other T products. AOL wins in this scenario for a several reasons; AOL gets instant broadband leadership position. Overtime, AOL significantly reduces overhead cost by getting rid of dial up POPs and network peering points(if all traffic is on one network, there doesn't need to be any peering). later, -t DEFINITIONS: RDC: Regional Datacenter: this is the regional hub of the cable companies local infrastructure where all the area coax is aggregated. Typically, there is one RDC per region(ie. SF Bay Area) that connects to multiple regional headends via fiber. The headends then connect to neighborhood nodes via fiber. The neighborhood nodes then connect to homes via copper. ATHM brings it's backbone connections directly to these facilities. MSO: Multi System Operator: cable company HFC: Hybrid Fiber Coax: the local MSO infrastructure consists of a combination of fiber and copper. CLEC: competitive local exchange carrier: these are the new phone companies competing against the RBOC's. A result of the telco act of '94(? date might be wrong), these companies have been granted the right to 'resell' the RBOC's local loop/last mile(copper coming into home). Many of these companies have also built their own local infrastructure....RCN, TCG, Winstar, etc.