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Technology Stocks : Nortel Networks (NT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (4931)	2/26/2000 5:24:00 PM
From: Techplayer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14638

Ken, No. How much is a DMS switch? Brian

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (4931)	2/26/2000 8:12:00 PM
From: DenverTechie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14638

Ken, the ANTEC deal does not mean they will sell DMS switches to AT&T in those cities. A little clarification here. First of all, the deal states that ANTEC, only ANTEC and not Nortel has exclusive distribution rights for AT&T cable telephony in those cities. Nortel's connection to the deal is through their involvement in the Arris Interactive JV (which actually designs and builds the cable telephony gear). Nortel owns about 80% of the JV, ANTEC has the remaining percentage. But ANTEC is the actual distributor, not Nortel. Nortel can market the equipment to telephone companies and international cable companies, but not AT&T Broadband. Second, all these cities are presently served by a mixture of Lucent 5ESS and DMS switches, many of which were put in since May 1999. In fact, the switch that serves the San Francisco Bay Area (one of the 8 cities mentioned in the deal) is served by a Lucent 5ESS presently and will continue to be for the forseeable future. Also, there are many flavors of DMS switches such as DMS10, DMS100, DMS250 and DMS500. Depending on what the customer has specified, the cost can range from several hundred thousand dollars to commonly $1.5 million or more per circuit switch. This is part of the mania to move to IP Telephony which uses much lower cost routers than these extremely expensive circuit switches. Part of the cost is offset by having to install multiple servers for various functions that the circuit switch used to do. You can't just eliminate the circuit switch and route phone calls over a packet network. There's a lot of infrastructure provided by that circuit switch that is very costly to reproduce in the IP world. Let me know if you like more info on any of these topics. TTFN