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Technology Stocks : Qwest Communications (Q) (formerly QWST) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JAG2 who wrote (284)	11/6/1997 11:01:00 AM
From: Will Carson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6846

All, Seems the price is dropping cause institutional bids have dried up; I guess they are looking for bargains. All recent news has been good. Other comments? Will

To: JAG2 who wrote (284)	11/6/1997 1:38:00 PM
From: John Klein	Respond to of 6846

Please visit biz.yahoo.com for the official word. It is pretty early to estimate earnings for '98, but growth has been impressive, and they are profitable in advance of the completion of the network. It is important not to confuse an IP network with a fiber network. IP is a higher-layer protocol that runs over another protocol stack. What AT&T is doing is sticking routers between circuits nad selling Internet access over that. It is almost laughable that they are just now entering a mature and vbery competative business. Based on AT&T's typical pricing strategies and the complexities of managing a network and a business in this segment, I highly doubt this will translate into a significant chunk of revenue for them. Too little, too late. What QWST will likely do is to dedicate a portion of their capacity to building a very state-of-the-art data network that can easily accomodate whatever higher layer protocol a customer desires (including IP, frame relay, video, or voice over any number of high level protocols). In fact, I would bet that they may go so far as to build a native IP over SONET network just because they can. Could AT&T do this? Possibly, but technical considerations aside (and their are plenty) this would mean a fundamental shift in their business approach and a wholesale scrapping of billions of dollars in existing network facilities. Nacchio begged for this years ago, and management just couldn't see it. What the world needs are datanetworks that can easily accomodate voice, in contrast to what we have now which is voice networks that poorly accomodate data (a basterdized quote from Reed Hundt). If you buy this line, you gotta like QWST.