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

To: zbyslaw owczarczyk who wrote (12634)	8/11/1999 7:17:00 AM
From: gbh	Respond to of 18016

MCI WorldCom Outage More Widespread Than Reported Carrier Claims 15 Percent Down, Support Center Says Otherwise By Margie Semilof Jackson, Miss. 5:42 PM EST Tues., Aug. 10, 1999 MCI WorldCom has been underplaying the magnitude of its Frame Relay network outage, according to its customers, who have spoken to technicians in MCI WorldCom's own support center. The Jackson, Miss.-based carrier suffered a massive outage of its network that started last Thursday night and continues until now. More than a year ago, in a similar situation, the AT&T Corp. network was down for roughly two days. The carrier told customers that only about 15 percent of its Frame Relay network was down, but information from MCI WorldCom's own support center suggests otherwise. One support technician said the switches that were affected were those made by Ascend Communications Inc., which now is owned by Lucent Technologies. One customer, who has lost his entire Frame Relay network, was told that Bell Laboratories technicians are working with MCI WorldCom technicians to rebuild the entire network from scratch. As of Tuesday, MCI WorldCom could not be reached for comment. However, a spokeswoman Monday reaffirmed that only 15 percent of the network was affected by the outage, which she characterized as "congestion." Rebuilding the Frame Relay network involves manually recreating permanent virtual circuits between sites. The work apparently proceeded too fast and the network crashed again, so by 3:30 the next day, technicians began a second network rebuild. Nick Colakovic, MIS manager at First Industrial Realty Trust, a Chicago-based real estate firm, said his entire network is out of commission. Colakovic said he was told the failure is related to a software upgrade that started two weeks ago. The failures were impacting major metropolitan areas including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Denver. MCI WorldCom has said the network is only congested because customer routers can show the permanent virtual circuits. Technically, MCI WorldCom can claim the network is up if customers are seeing periodic line management protocol messages from the network, Colakovic said. "They are playing a game by defining what is a failure," he said. "In the real world, the measure of whether a network is down is if traffic is actually flowing," Colakovic said. "In the current outage, this is not the case, so the network is down. I would be happy if I had one half of my network, but I'm not getting anything from them." Colakovic said he asked network managers Monday what the problem was and was told they did not know and did not know how to fix it. MCI WorldCom support staff said they did not expect the network problem to be fixed until at least midnight Tuesday.

To: zbyslaw owczarczyk who wrote (12634)	8/11/1999 7:24:00 AM
From: Glenn McDougall	Respond to of 18016

Financial Post article Wednesday August 11,l999 Newbridge profit warning sparked selloff by FMR The profit warning issued by Newbridge Networks Corp. on May 4 sparked a month-long selloff by FMR Corp., the holing company for Fidelity Investments Ltd. According to the weekly insider trading report published by the Ontario Securities Commission, FMR dumped more than 14% of its Newbridge holdings between May 4 and May 28 for proceeds of over 100 million. FMR reduced its holdings to 15.6 million after Newbridge said revenues would not meet expectations for the quarter ended May 2. The dozens of transactions were executed on the open market at prices between 36.812 to 27.227 (US) with the largest block of 160,000 shares sold at 28.885 (US) on May 6. FMR also bought a relatively small amount of shares in the aforementioned period.