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Technology Stocks : Global Crossing - GX (formerly GBLX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patsy Collins who wrote (2396)	10/15/1999 11:59:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15615

Patsy, good question. "With their 'piping' mostly in-place or announced, what other major developments could possibly remain?" With ubiquitous piping in place, bandwidth delivery begins to resemble the same dynamics that faced the semis - as chip sizes shrunk and the number of transistors per substrate increased logarithmically. Likewise, the fiber barons will be faced with shrinking revs per unit produced. Nothing new here. What will be new, and necessary, however, will be how they begin to provide value added services both to their wholesale customers (i.e., other carriers and _x_SPs) and large enterprise users. Some improvements will be at the upper layers through the acquisitions that many of the barons have made. MFNX's AboveNet, GBLS's Frontier's Global Center, etc. But given that those might to some extent cancel each other out, more or less, the remaining piece of the puzzle focuses on the huge bandwidth supplies they have at their disposal, as you point out. What might those value added capabilities and features be? A lot will depend on how easily they are able to substitute their new fiber metro nets (at first) for the prevailing incumbents' nets. Sounds simple. But the incumbents smell this coming, and already they are beginning to contemplate (and in the case of BEL, already cut...) deals with emerging dark fiber carriers, power companies, and cable operators in some cases, who can facilitate the transition to a photonic underlayer through their recently laid fiber networks. Some value added features will center on improved turnaround times for the delivery of high capacity (T1s, T3s and OC-n's take sinfully long to install today); alternative pricing schemes which are keyed to actual usage in the megaflow ranges, metered by some breakaway software applications; seamless (actually constant) interfacing at the physical layer, irrespective of speeds and protocols used. And so on; quality of service (QoS) shaping and outsourcing of SLA'ed arrangements; and so on. And to be sure, abundant bandwidth supplies will open up new markets which heretofore have always been deemed too prohibitive to even contemplate. There's actually plenty of room for innovation by the fiber barons, to improve both their offerings, and their revenues. If they wait too long to effect these changes, however, the problem might be that they could become too comfortable grandfathering, or leveraging, off of the inefficiencies - and the attendant bloated fees - which have characterized the present and past. Regards, Frank Coluccio