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

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (9332)	8/29/1999 10:20:00 AM
From: The Phoenix	Respond to of 21876

Ken, That was my take-away too. I'm not sure that Cisco's extension into optical however will lead them to a total vertical integration style company. If so, I don't think they would have ever let LU take INSS. KnowwhatImean? OG

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (9332)	8/29/1999 10:43:00 AM
From: Techplayer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21876

Ken, I agree. One company out there that would be a great acquisition to CSCO would be Corvis. 3200 km with no signal regeneration seems amazing to me. brian

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (9332)	8/29/1999 11:04:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21876

Hi Ken, "I believe Cisco's experience in IP will benefit it in optical networking." Their experience in IP will be beneficial, of course, but not, IMO, materially to their penetration into the optical core. At least not just yet. And not on a par which would be proportionate to their IP prowess. In this sense, optical tends to neutralize many of the advantages that big routing achieves under normal circumstances at lower aggregate route speeds, where IP is king. High capacity optical transport, even where IP-based Inter-networking takes place, appears to be headed to lower layer switching (at least during an interim stage. For example, Layer 2 MPLS-like networking (Monterey), albeit, driven by addresses at Layer 3... and sonetized solutions and Add-Drop Layer 1 and 2 switching (Cerent)]. Even layer 2 GbE over lambda is becoming a favored means of transport in a growing number of situations, such as enterprise MANs and CANs (campus area networks). I look to very high density long haul routes also using Ethernet in the future at the Gigabit and 10 GbE levels at some point. And while Ethernet and other Layer 2 techniques may increasingly be used to encapsulate IP packets in the core, IP will continue to dominate at the edge and end point distribution levels. The Layer 2 techniques will merely serve to "flatten" the topology to a great extent, which means reducing the number of hop counts and their associated latencies and adminstrative headaches for SPs. There are pluses and minuses to this "advantage" which go beyond the scope of this thread. If the Cerent-Monterey acquisitions have taught us only one thing, then that one thing is this: CSCO has recognized the need to participate more forcefully in the WAN at multiple layers of the stack... not just at Layer 3, or IP. FWIW. Regards, Frank Coluccio