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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: the dodger who wrote (30795)8/31/2000 1:37:37 PM
From: Uncle Frank  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 54805
 
That's a fine analysis, Dodger. I've had a hard time seeing jnpr as other than a Monkey with a speed improvement (continuous innovation). They are a fine company with returns that appeal to my greedy side, but imo, they represent no threat to Silverback Cisco in the context of a Gorilla Game.

I think folks are beginning to forget some of the lessons we learned in April. Mr. Market is still capable of turning on us during September and October, and high fliers like jnpr will be particularly vulnerable to his moods. For that reason, I'm still using risk/reward as my primary evaluation tool. Viewed in this manner, Cisco and Qualcomm jump to the top of my screen.

uf



To: the dodger who wrote (30795)8/31/2000 3:40:34 PM
From: Win-Lose-Draw  Respond to of 54805
 
What an excellent thread y'all have here!

Ok, this JNPR thing. I guess the basic question is just how big can the router market be? Here's my shot at it. These are literally back-of-the-napkin calculations because I'm eating lunch.

Skip forward a few (5-10) years to the Star Trek future just around the corner when everybody in the G7 nations has highspeed access to the net. This will probably happen sooner than we expect. So where does that leave us...all numbers approximate...

1 billion people surfing
1 hour a day at
1 Mbit/s

If average household size is 4 people that gives us 250M Mbit ports. Picking Alcatel for no particular reason I see a product called the ASAM, which among other things aggregates DSL lines. One 7-foot rack's worth of ASAM aggregates about 650 lines. 250M ports / 650 ports / rack => 385k (!!) racks just to connect everyone to the local exchange. If a loaded rack costs, say, $100k, that's $~38B in revenue.

I'm starting to feel vertigo...

Each of those ASAM racks can generate ~650Mbit/s traffic, but that assumes everyone is on at the same time. For an nicely distributed 1 hour a day per person traffic would be 650M/24 => 27MBits/s. But life is never that smooth, so bring that back up by, say, 4x to compensate for peak traffic periods. Now we're getting close to an OC-3 traffic rate, so let's go with that.

OK, now we have 385k boxes outputting an OC-3 stream of traffic and we need to connect them to routers. Let's keep it simple and assume everybody plugs into an OC-192 router. And we do need capacity for all those OC-3 lines because we already backed out underutilzation at the local exchange. That's 385k / (192 / 3) => 385k/64 => ~50k OC-192 routers. I don't know what one of these is running these days, but let's go with what I'm guessing is a lowside price of $1M a pop. That's $50B for the routers, and that doesn't include the backbone routers between the edge routers. Figure another 50% for that, now we're up to $75B.

And at this point we've only wired up 1 person in 6...

Whew. That was a bit of work. Y'all feel free to quibble with the numbers, I won't take the least bit of offense.



To: the dodger who wrote (30795)8/31/2000 4:01:40 PM
From: MarkR37  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 54805
 
<<But if that's true, couldn't CSCO solve their Juniper problem with an AVCI-like acquisition? I figure if the DOJ allows JDSU to acquire ETEK & SDLI, then would they have a problem allowing CSCO to swallow a company with no market share and only 500K in revenue?>>

I remember reading about Juniper before they came public and wondered why CSCO did not buy them out early. If AVCI has the goods (and we should know fairly soon because several companies are sampling their hardware) than I think CSCO should take them out sooner rather than later.



To: the dodger who wrote (30795)9/1/2000 12:07:14 AM
From: nosmo_king  Respond to of 54805
 
td: terrific post & much appreciated.
The knowledge deficit I have in this area is staggering, and wonder if you, BB or others can help with some questions:

And this brings up Avici (or some other nameless hot-box maker). Information on their router is at best sketchy --and only one customer to date -- Enron -- that I am aware of. But Enron field-tested Avici against both CSCO and Juniper, and at least claims the Avici router is far superior to that of Juniper's. (But Enron also has an equity stake in AVCI, so that takes something away from the endorsement.)

Enron is certainly high on AVCI's terabit routing, but with a little searching, I've found that others are also testing their wares: "Avici’s TSR on the other hand is already deployed within the National Transparent Optical Network (NTON), has received a combined $45 million commitment from Enron (ENE/$87.63/Buy) and Williams Communications, is in trials with AT&T, and has conducted testing with Deutsche Telekom (DT/$39/Market Peformer), and Qwest."

(see cnetinvestor.com )

So now it seems this little local (to me <g>) company is now playing with some of the big boys-- is it fair to assume that there is there room for multiple successful players in this sector? If AVCI's (or some other company's router) proves to be far superior (performance, scalability... a big and unproven assumption), are the switching costs high if one attempts to replace a current system from, say Juniper's router, to a company x router, instead of pursuing an upgrade to a higher performing Juniper product?

thanks in advance,
nosmo

(no positions in any of above companies, sadly <g>)