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Technology Stocks : IDT *(idtc) following this new issue?* -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 613 who wrote (30134)	3/9/2004 8:25:39 PM
From: carreraspyder	Respond to of 30916

i have to listen to the conference call. there's something in the call about '5' deals/contracts, or whatever. i have to figure out what i think the exact context is. the earnings report did not lift me at all. because i wasn't after numbers, but something fitting in with past quarters. well, i'd have liked a better match to last quarter. i did think if there was one more finalization bad (not really bad) quarter for exiting the wholesale market and adir, we would see it here. i can't tell you it was the last such quarter. i don't like the idea of those ntop shares going over to IDT. I finally have the idea that actually there is something very agressive about it -- assuming ntop can be very aggressive. if they are, they may hit globally every bit as well as vonage, and just possibly better. but vonage is good at going for it. idt (international) and liberty media (international) shouldn't be downplayed, in the new context of VoiceLine -- competition to vonage at vonage's level. However, can ntop play vonage's aggression re rollouts as well as vonage. That should be taken in a context -- i think ntop was probably right in not being perceived as competing with u.s. tier 2 cable companies -- but providing them a service. [Vonage aggressively sought even more relationships with lower tier cable companies, and hasn't found them. They found lots of marketing outlets though.] But ntop is a primary llne provider, not secondary or a pretend primary line provider like vonage. That's not meant to be a hack at vonage -- they have really done very well. But vonage has gotten all of one portion of a niche, and net2phone never defined success in it's niche. Except, now, there are apparently 5 something or others cooking. Now, if were sneaky what i might think because VoiceLink was just announced, and ntop knows it has credibility issues and lack of faith issues, and they deliberately decided, knowing what msos they can mark up as theirs over the near term anyway, to THEN compete. Ntop management, as well as you or i, have seen what and how vonage did well. But vonage is going to run up against a fence -- it may roll out to subscriber after subscriber, but the more it is successful, them more companies (new startups; voip companies; traditional telecom companies) will compete with a 'vonage' box. It's all income, once a subscriber subscribes, if you can manage calls. Some can; some won't do as well. So there is a tactical situation appearing now, where ntop may have done the right thing. i don't think they planned it in advance; i think they had the foresight to move into the market with packetcable, and then realize there was a lot of pie (not pig) left. so we're sitting on another rollout period; the certainly is 5 whatever (with the facesaving comment that 'we're even rolling out a little infrastructure). as far as i can tell (and i haven't yet heard the call), that's not 'actively negotiating with.' i don't know what happens tomorrow; but if i was a bigger size investor, i'd look at what i looked at here. without the '5' comment, of course we'd retrace. we may, but it won't be sticky. and i lament the downside too. if i transcribe the conference, i can't do it tonite. have to work on brought home work. again, what i really didn't like was the ntop shares to idt (actually they are all being assigned to WinStar). but there may be something magical there. i mean by that something decent coming out of competing on two levels, aggressively. i can't tell you what ntop gets; but it gets the company to something better than what is in store for it without VoiceLink. Maybe it had prior magic; i don't know. i do know i feel the cable telephony opportunity is right. Perform. next year is a different trigger. this is sign up of msos -- going to whatever ntop gets. next year though, there is going to be a lot of hype by a lot of companies that have entered the business, including from second half of 2004 rollouts and comcast and cox 2005 deployments -- about building up subsribers. different sort of take up. that's the features of my thughts. i accept the but when relationship we keep seeing. i don't approve. i think a promise to us is one thing, and a negotiation is another. the bottom line is 5 somethings. well, we thought today they owed us 1 or magically 2, and they did. i feel ntop is the best voip company/cable telephony company i could be in. that doesn't mean daytraders haven't taken it to the shorts. look at the comparatives, and there rise and decline. wholesale is a b*tch. cable telephony is a niche, and there aren't other players all the way up at ntop's level. doesn't mean that everyone wants them. i suspect ntop cuts a mean deal, and there is proving too that it helps a company generate income. that's the new feature. Prove.

To: 613 who wrote (30134)	3/10/2004 12:54:43 AM
From: carreraspyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 30916

NTOP 3/9/04 earnings conference call (rather than a transcript, which is an all nite job) .stuff in brackets or parenthesis represents my comments, inserted elliptically ... into context. Ntop is now completely out of wholesale calling card business in the United States. There will be no more quarterly expenses because of wholesale U.S. card calling. Ntop is the only provider in world today offering both PacketCable telephony and SIP-based voIP. Ntop feels if it offers an individual modem box, like Vonage, it will have a negative impact on its overall offerings. Ntop believes this could have/could have had a negative effect re obtaining agreements, and re the perception “it’s not really primary line service, so negative feedback about what ntop supplied if it supplied the Vonage solution,” would come to negatively impact Ntop’s reputation. Wholesale voIP is price competitive worldwide, and going to continue to be very price competitive. NTOP is being forced to either bypass Internet cafes if its margins are lowered too much by accepting the business in certain regions; or sometimes will accept lower rates to obtain certain pieces of businesses if that is what its sales managers recommend. Liberty Puerto Rico wanted cable telephony subscribership held steady in Puerto Rico while it trained its sales reps and truck rollout drivers. It took 8 weeks to get 1,000 subscribers. The customer – Liberty Media Puerto Rico wanted a trial with 200 customers; wanted it to ramp up to 1,000 and not more so drivers and sales reps in Puerto Rico could be trained, then Liberty after they are trained, Liberty will role out cable telephony to its Puerto Rico footprint. (Greenberg: “That’s what the customer! wants, yes sir.”) There are at least 5 “situations” Ntop has to announce, which includes the U.S., South America, and Western Europe. People were leaving ‘tonight” (March 9) for some of those areas. Some of the 5 situations will be MOUs and some will be contracts. People are installing infrastructure concurrently simultaneously with lawyers working out the contracts, instead of MOUs. Announcements and deployment for these msos, will be simultaneous. Greenberg’s deliberately selected example: If somebody selected Net2Phone at the early part of the year, and it takes 90 days to get to dial tone at the head end (deploy), and depending on when the selection is made you will see the contract announcement with a full-blown deployment. [Prior to its earnings announcement last week (prior means 2 weeks ago), Mediacom said it would announce details of its voIP deployment within the ensuring 30 days.] cabledatacomnews.com (the 5 msos mentioned in the url are coincidental – not exactly or necessarily the cable msos references below) [We're very excited with what we're seeing in the whole VoIP space," said John Pascarelli, executive vice president of operations for Mediacom. "We'll be making our announcement in the next 30 days." – url came out 1 March; comment made prior to that.] Cable msos will look around, but evidently they come to Net2Phone – because of what it offers that others don’t. Nobody else has what Net2Phone has. So far, so good with what’s happening with NTOP. Greenberg said: Each contract is different – every cable mso is different, and their footprint may differ – if they are being hurt by satellite in one region, or DSL and pricing on high speed (fyi, the url above re Mediacom mentions it will marketing first to high speed subscribers)– so can’t be a master contract situation. What takes time is not the selection of net2phone once the cable company sees its tech in Puerto Rico, for example. What takes time is NTOP viewing the cable company’s infrastructure and then the drafting to see that it meets the cable msos needs so that it is done once, to last for next 10 years. Ntop can be selected by a company as its vendor. Then NTOP goes out to review its structure, to achieve dial tone in a 90-dayperiod. During that time period, the lawyers can draft the agreements. [comment re looking at experiential development: What is now in Greenberg’s head re deployment, and heading up issue responses, makes him an invaluable asset. That can’t be replaced by new, inexperienced Net2phone specific hiring. He’s in an ebullient mood. At some points, he was having fun in the conference call – not like the last conference where we were awaiting news and he had nothing to supply. That’s my insight; I’m not saying that to promote. He’s looking forward to being rewarded (feels vindicated) – that’s what his comment re universal acclaim/lawyers meant on a Steve Greenberg unconscious level. – A la the movie “Grease: -- “VoIP is the word and everybody is using it. It’s no longer disruptive, and everybody’s using it.”] [comment: the more ntop’s share value increases, the more asset value NTOP drives into IDT because IDT gets a fixed number of Class A NTOP shares each quarter, for the next five years.] There are 5 situations right now in which Net2phone is doing the actual provisioning – domestically and internationally. This is ongoing as we speak. It depends when you start counting during the year when the announcements come out. My take is then if someone signed up in January, we see something at the end of March; in February at the end of April, and if in March, at the end of May/June. Five already doing some engineering work for, and in the process of negotiating an MOU. That’s beyond Cebridge. Doesn’t include Cebridge. Nothing has changed re Cebridge; it’s going forward and will become definitive in the near future as well. They have selected NTOP and that they intend to deploy as has been spoken about in the past. These are PacketCable deals – not SIP. [So these are tier 2 cable telephony deployments somewhere in the world Net2Phone is undertaking. There are 5 deals to be announced – all new.] Ntop will file 10Q in about a week. Ntop has no classic debt at all. Net2Phone sees 10% of 82 million of homes passed as NTOP’s target over the next four years. That’s what they believe. Greenberg said that throughout the road show and guided that ever since. That is tier 2 and tier 3 cable mso operators. It excludes any tier 1, it excludes anything in Asia, it excludes anything with Charter and Adelphia, and it excludes anything with any major Liberty Media property. The goal of 10% of 82 million homes passed in four plus years includes tier 2 and tier 3 cable companies but not the exceptions above. Deals with these entities would change the forecast. That is what he was talking about. He was only talking about the forecast. [Comment: Because ntop has maintained this as its achievable target through ongoing analyst meetings over a period of months while it dealt with tier 2 and 3 cable msos and now in this conference call reiterated that the target is achievable, knowing the cable mso deals in hand, the company has to feel they can be providing cable telephony services to 8.2 million homes in 4 years, exclusive of anything related to SIP voIP; and exclusive of company contributions from the global retail voIP division.] For, overall cash burn you’re talking about $6.5 - $7 million cash burn for the quarter. Cash increased 51.1 million from follow-on share offering. The company reported cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities of $138.8 million as of January 31, 2004. It was an informative call.