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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zbyslaw owczarczyk who wrote (11362)	6/9/2001 12:50:15 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12823

ZO, If I can jump in here, you asked: Are you suggesting that Thomson bought dead business? I would have to believe that Alcatel would 1) never sell a business that it expected to be a continuing above average profit center and 2) probably has a much keener sense of what is coming down the road in telecom than does Thomson. I don't know it for sure yet. But my intuition is that the 50% growth rate in DSL subscriptions is very shortly going to become a much smaller number. Several factors are at work. The CLECs are dropping like urban beggars in a Black Plague, the ILECs have made the installation process so frustrating that most consumers understand that getting DSL could involve considerable pain and anxiety, the ILECs are also prone to raising DSL rates as soon as competition is wiped out and I firmly believe that while Thomson may come up with a DSL modem that can be installed by the end user, that they still won't have solved or even addressed the issue of dirty pairs of UTP, which are ubiquitous to the copper cage and require lots of fiddly adjustments by qualified service personnel who will have even less motivation to get out into the field with the easier part of the installation handled by the consumer, eliminating what little easy money there was in the truck roll regime of today. In brief, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Thomson got snookered on this deal. Regards, Ray :)