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Technology Stocks : COM21 (CMTO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Laubach who wrote (1639)	1/31/2000 3:52:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2347

So, the little Specs are not only not born but based on all the news out of CableLabs, the bride and groom have been told to take a cold shower and come back later. On a more positive note, it would be interesting to do a comparison of "value adds" offered by all the modem vendors, particularly on their DOCSIS products. It would also be interesting to compare markets for proprietary products. We know Canada has said it will go with the standard. However, since Europe doesn't have DOCSIS, is there a parallel standard that will overtake proprietary sales? In other words, where will proprietary sales continue to have strength and where should we look for DOCSIS growth? You see where I'm headed. . . TIA --- Pat

To: Mark Laubach who wrote (1639)	1/31/2000 3:56:00 PM
From: lml	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2347

This simple technical argument should make it clear: both the TERN and Com21 proprietary modems use their own customized MAC and PHY in the downstream channel which is hard coded into the modem ASICs of each company's products. Mark: (1) What does MAC stand for? Media access channel or something else? (2) Must the MAC (whatever it is) & PHY be hard-coded into the gates of the modem chipset? Isn't it possible today to rely upon non-volatile flash memory to soft-code the modems whereby it would be possible to "migrate" from proprietary to a DOCSIS protocol? If so, isn't it possible that TERN's modems (or any other manufacturer's for that matter) could take advantage of this type of reprogrammability to make that migration possible with today's proprietary protocols? TIA for your commments.