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Technology Stocks : Advanced Fibre (AFCI) ** IPO -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E_K_S who wrote (2999)	5/21/2000 2:15:00 PM
From: lml	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3299

Eric: Thanks for posting the article, however, I think your concern with AFCI, which appears to be a recurring theme with you, which is good, is a bit overblown. First off, the employment of the Centillium chip is not exclusive to ALA. To be honest, I don't even know if AFCI supplies line cards to their customers. Nevertheless, SBC is not going to go with a proprietary line card that, for example, operates only as designed if connected only to ALA DSLAMs, or ALA DLCs such as Litespan. Second, this type of strategy, IMHO, does not appear to work with major carriers. They want & demand flexibility in their components, which is why AFCI's UMC platform has been attractive, & thereby successful. So while employment of the Centillium chip is a positive development for ALA, it is not necessarily the death knell to AFCI or any other customer of SBC, or from any other carrier for that matter. SBC has made it clear, time & time again, which for some reason you're not appreciating, that they will NOT be LOCKED IN WITH any one supplier. They will go with those equipment suppliers who can meet their design criteria; who can meet their time-to-market requirements; and who can provide a flexible platform that will enable SBC to (1) preserve their legacy networks, if desired; (2) deliver varying levels of advanced services to customers depending upon geographic location and economic markets; & (3) permit SBC to alter their strategy to deliver different services should circumstances and/or strategy change. Granted, AFCI is in a competitive industry. Many highly qualified equipment suppliers compete for SBC's business. Such business will not be limited to AFCI, ALA, or CSCO, and any SBC decision to go with any one supplier over another is not necessarily going to "spell the end" to AFCI's business with SBC. This is the type of relationships SBC prefers to maintain with its "approved" suppliers. Notwithstanding, SBC is just be one of quite a number of AFCI's customers. My advice is to weigh the foregoing with the fact that ALA neither has nor will ever control the proprietary technology of the line card business. Centillium owns its technology & is not about to grant ALA an EXCLUSIVE license for application thereof into its own line cards. If, for example, AFCI wished to compete head-to-head with ALA on this line card issue, it could strike a similar deal with Centillium. OTOH, I'm sure that there are other chips out there with the same or similar capabilities. Providing VoDSL is a clear strategy of SBC. If you are in SBC territory, and if Pronto is coming to your neighborhood, VoDSL will be there in about a year or so. And if it is, I can almost guarantee you, it will not EXCLUSIVELY be via a ALA line card; there will be other manufacturer's cards deployed besides ALA's