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Technology Stocks : (LVLT) - Level 3 Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yogizuna who wrote (2526)	10/27/2000 1:19:19 PM
From: David C. Burns	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3873

Aside from the very real fact that the Monarch is under extreme pressure already, the reality is that LVLT / Kiewit knew about these restrictions when they set out the construction plan (if they did not, that's gross incompetence), and they failed to incorporate it into the plan or they failed to execute. These are not new regulations. If you focus on the company's execution and do less gratuitous bomb throwing, perhaps it will help us understand the performance of LVLT more.

To: Yogizuna who wrote (2526)	10/29/2000 9:22:52 AM
From: IngotWeTrust	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 3873

<font color=red>NOOOooooooOOOW Yoda, WATCH IT~~!~~ You guys crack me up... I report this cost overruns, time-delaying, rackin' up fines for trespassing on BLM (because the railroad is too far away???), major erosion causing sloppy company, "damning the torpedoes, STRAIGHT AHEAD" work ethic, and I get written off as a crack-pot??? Now, some newbie pops into view with her "electronic article" talking about CA landslide season, fissures/faults, and poor "bitter tasting to the birds anyhow" Monarch Butterfly habitats, and LoF suddenly becomes grateful for "headszup" and Yoda lobs mudballs at whacked out environmentalists. GIMME A FRIGGIN' BREAK! Now, you know I'm NOT a whacked out environmentalist, Yoda, seeings as how I am a goldminer, and that REEEEEEALLY makes the Sierra Club Set livid. Doesn't anyone see a pattern here besides me? PATTERN A: LVLT's ENTIRE NATIONAL CRISSCROSSING INSTALL was promised to be completed by END OF 1999 or doesn't anyone besides me remember that? And today's date is....? PATTERN B: LVLT's "conservative" "Do it now, I don't Care How, and we'll pay the fines (maybe) and litigate it into the 3rd millenium because we have Gates paying our bills" mentality/work ethic driving this project -- which I have reported on here first since I've watched them up close and personal on their "trek" through Eastern Oregon -- has already been reported to this thread. LVLT's thumbing their noses at BLM reg's and now taking on the locals (in CA) is nothing but a vital organ hemorhage. Now you all are hearing Maureen whoozit write it up down LA way in the land called CA, and you act like this is new news? C'mon, now Yoda, you know better! PATTERN C: "We're going to lay the rest of it along RailRoad Right of way..." myth still being put forth as public pablum for PR damage control I see. Didn't do it consistently here--hence the major trespassing onto BLM here---, doubt their doing much "railroad right of way" install "there" either... Makes for major credibility problems on the cum, in states where LVLT hasn't finished "criss-crossing yet"... *WHAT A CROCK!* I've already dealt with that falsehood out here in Eastern Oregon. And if y'all believe that B/S line for the great state of California, SHAME ON YOU, one and all. Yoda, this isn't Brain Surgery: A) Project Delays B) Trespassing, Fines, and Untruths in PR C) Adds up to WHOOha cash consumption into the next QUADrenium! OF COURSE this stock is going lower...I don't even think Greenspan loaning them the key to WestPoint Currency Printing Facilities can pull enough POS cash flow into this cash burning cow for even my grandkids' grandkids to realize stock price appreciation goals. Face it boyz...one INVESTS (notice I didn't say Flips, or shorts or trades) any equity for one of two reasons: price appreciation or dividend income...doesn't matter which one...any one will do. This one is so dead that it makes the straw-stuffed mannikan at the local "weekend spookhouse" look like moon-walkin' Michael... Whacked out environmentalists my asp... When was the last time you, Yoda, had to deal with "bitter butterflies" OR NAVIGATE CALIFORNIA MUDSLIDES during the raining, no make that cloudburst/monsoon months called "Winter" in my neighbor to the south? So, y'all have two "reporters"...me and her. Hope y'all can at least hear "her" ... ...maybe it is because she knows how to write in "frames..." Duh...

To: Yogizuna who wrote (2526)	10/30/2000 10:52:49 PM
From: SecularBull	Respond to of 3873

From Forbes: Get 'em While They're Cold STOCK MARKET INVESTORS ARE always manic-depressive. Rarely, however, have investors demonstrated their ability to shoot to higher highs or slump to lower lows than over the past year, as they have tried to price the debt and equity of the entrepreneurial companies laying the pipes through which will flow much of the commerce of the information age. We're talking about the outfits that are digging up streets and laying down fiber-optic cable, mostly in the U.S. and Europe. Through these broadband conduits will flow interactive media and the always-on Internet services that will someday be as common as water and electricity. But the market's tech malaise has clobbered broadband fiber stocks, as well as their junk bonds. The fears: too much debt; too many companies laying too much fiber; too many carriers planning to raise money to build wireless networks. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the collapse in prices suggests that these problems have now been priced into the broadband companies' shares and bonds. Time for a contrarian play, with bargains abounding in bandwidth. And time to look twice at some of the fears. Like the one about a bandwidth glut. Yes, there is a lot of capacity going in the ground. But the demand for big pipes to carry bits of information--whether in the form of basic data files or video libraries--is exploding. Many consultants are forecasting that the number of broadband connections in Europe will increase thirtyfold over the next four years. To judge from history, the predictions will probably prove far too conservative. Why? Because there is no way to know how many new information-based services will be developed once the delivery networks are in place. It's like trying to predict car sales before the highways are paved. According to research at Lucent's Bell Labs, demand has consistently outstripped forecasts within a matter of a few years. In 1978 Bell Labs believed that the world would never need to move more than one gigabit of data at a time. Capacity is now more like 1,000 times those early forecasts. What about all those wireless broadband networks under construction in Europe? They will in fact help global broadband pipe builders. Much of the wireless Web will pass through the terrestrial lines on its way to mobile handsets. The financing needs of laying fiber in the ground and installing servers and software to carry massive amounts of data look downright reasonable compared with the costs of building a wireless network. The price tag for building new wireless networks in western Europe will be something like $175 billion. By contrast, the top ten fiber-optic builders in Europe will need only another $20 billion to $40 billion over the next few years. No question that the falling prices that telecoms can charge for bandwidth are frightening at first glance. "Prices for pure capacity will fall on the order of 70% a year for the next two to three years--and that's a conservative estimate," says Oleksiy Soroka, a junk bond analyst in London for Credit Suisse First Boston. The dark cloud on the horizon is a hesitancy by investors to put up the capital that companies need to keep building their networks. Many of the smaller players already loaded down with debt won't get capital. For them and their investors the best hope is an opportunistic takeover by a bigger player with a healthier balance sheet. Companies in this vulnerable class: RSL, Thus and Global TeleSystems. By contrast, for the healthier operators the capital markets remain open even now, although terms are far less generous than a year ago. Example: Energis, a London-based upstart competing in local service. Energis raised $564 million in new equity on Sept. 21 but at tremendous cost to shareholders. Its shares sank 16% in the two days after the financing was announced, wiping $1.5 billion from its market capitalization. As public investors have stampeded out of broadband carriers, shrewd private-equity investors have moved in. Anthony Klarman and Melvin Rosa, junk-bond telecom analysts with Deutsche Bank, calculate that such private equity outfits as Forstmann Little, Hicks Muse, Vulcan and Thomas Lee have, in the past year, invested close to $10 billion in U.S. companies competing in the local market. Another likely source of money: vendor financing from Nortel, Lucent, Motorola and other equipment makers. Possible winners: Cable & Wireless: It bought MCI Networks in 1998 and is now buying fiber in Europe, giving it immediate installed capacity at a bargain price. Unlike the upstarts it competes against, C&W will make money next year and has great global reach. The pile of cash and shares it received from selling Hongkong Telecom makes it a takeover target. KPN Qwest: This firm combines the know-how that KPN, the Dutch national carrier, has in Europe with the management and engineering talent from U.S. broadband-builder Qwest. The 18-month-old company is on much more solid ground than most of its competitors. KPN Qwest already has more high-quality fiber in the ground than any other challenger to Europe's national carriers. It has a Web-hosting joint venture with IBM and plans to steal a march on some local carriers with its high-speed DSL services. XO Communications: Controlled by Craig McCaw, the U.S. cellular baron, the six-year-old company (formerly Nextlink) is in some U.S. cities and bought an international Internet service provider last year, giving it entry to the European market. XO is also in the process of purchasing a fiber network connecting 21 European cities; it will be ready by next year. XO has pushed hard into data services, which will provide 40% of revenues this year. Level 3: James Crowe, the man who built Uunet, an early Internet backbone, is at it again with Level 3 Communications. Level 3 is a pure Internet Protocol network, already up and running in big U.S. cities and in five European markets. Crowe promises "aggressive and disruptive" bandwidth pricing. Energis: The London-based company focuses on business clients, where margins are higher, and is moving from voice traffic to data. Colt: This is an eight-year-old London-based competitor in local markets with a U.K. network "second to none," says Sean Johnstone, a telecom analyst at SG Securities in London. But it is still primarily a voice carrier. It aims to add more cities to its network and expand data services from the U.K. to the Continent. One market whisper: a merger with KPN Qwest.

To: Yogizuna who wrote (2526)	10/31/2000 9:39:01 AM
From: SecularBull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3873

Taking telecom to the next level October 31, 2000 12:00 AM PT by Michael J. Ybarra From the December 2000 issue of UPSIDE magazine On a clear day outside Jim Crowe's office in Broomfield, Colo., the Rocky Mountains stretch toward heaven, some peaks topping 14,000 feet and dwarfing everything else in the landscape. Somehow, it doesn't seem like an accident that Crowe decided to build a company in such a dramatic setting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I am kind of hoping for a Justice Department antitrust investigation of our market dominance before I'm gone."--Level 3 CEO Jim Crowe -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Three years ago, Crowe founded Level 3 Communications (LVLT). It wasn't your average startup. For one thing, Crowe's seed money was $2 billion. For another, there was his business plan, which basically called for burying at least three times that amount in the ground, to create a global fiber optics network that would become the fast lane of the information superhighway. And he was betting on a technology called Internet protocol (IP), the long-haul trucking service of the Web but an unproven way of making phone calls, which Level 3 would have to offer to compete with other telecoms. Finally, Level 3's aim was to cut prices continually and expand bandwidth to introduce Moore's Law of exponential leaps in computing power to the staid world of telecommunications. Crowe's goal, in short, was to make Level 3 the dominant data carrier of the early 21st century, the company whose name is synonymous with its market: in other words, another Intel (INTC) or Microsoft (MSFT). "I am kind of hoping for a Justice Department antitrust investigation of our market dominance before I'm gone," says Crowe, the cheerful and confident CEO of Level 3. Thinking big Bold plans, to be sure, but Level 3 already has won over Wall Street, which has showered billions on the company, allowing it to fund its $13.7 billion, five-year construction project. And this month, Level 3 expects to complete its 16,000-mile U.S. fiber-optic highway, which will ultimately tie the company's 56 metro networks in the United States and 6.5 million square feet of data-storage facilities with similar communications webs that Level 3 is building in Europe and Asia. Level 3's plan is to provide the cheapest and most advanced network to connect the dots of the dotcom world. "While people don't focus on it," Crowe says, "the fact is that the whole data world --what we call the Web, the Internet and all of those dotcom companies -- essentially rides on the physical infrastructure owned by the telcos. None of which was designed to handle that kind of rapidly changing traffic. That whole infrastructure has to be rebuilt to the tune of a trillion bucks or something." And no one is digging faster than Level 3, which is burning through $121 million a week (or $6.5 billion this year) to create in five years the size network that MCI spent 15 years building. So far, Level 3's plan is running ahead of schedule. Analysts are smitten with the company. "If past is prologue, they're going to knock the ball out of the park," asserts William Klein, an analyst at Wasserstein Perella Securities. "A year ago, people thought of Level 3 as an old coal-mining company slapped together by some weirdo in the boonies of Colorado. But Crowe's really built himself an extremely low-cost network and probably the most scalable network in the world. There are only a handful of guys I consider visionary in this business. Crowe's one of three." "It's my favorite stock," adds Andrew Hamerling, an analyst at Banc of America Securities. "I think Level 3 has the most upside of all the emerging networking companies. The management is tier-one, and it's a deep bench. Fifty years from now, this network will still be usable. Provided that bandwidth consumption really takes off, then the Level 3 model will be the best model out there." REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE: upside.com