Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Jung who wrote (22666)	11/11/1997 1:39:00 PM
From: Jeff Jordan	Respond to of 61433

Future For Networks Is Data, Not Voice (11/11/97; 1:00 p.m. EST) By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb NEW YORK -- Qwest Communications CEO Joseph Nacchio has taken a look at the WorldCom-MCI merger and sees the personality of WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, but gets lost on his logic. "Bernie is a smart guy," said Nacchio at the Communications Managers Association conference here on Tuesday. "But the question is: How can you spend that much money for a company [in] voice long distance?" In a global marketplace where annual spending on telecommunications services is expected to eclipse $1 trillion by 2001 -- and $150 billion in the United States -- the future for networks is not in voice, but in data, said Nacchio, who has been at Qwest for one year after 26 years at AT&T. Denver-based Qwest, which had its initial public offering last summer, is a year-and-a-half from completing a fiber-optic network that will connect 120 cities in the United States and Mexico. "The carriers want to give you 56 kilobits per second that looks like voice," Nacchio said. "It's not because they take stupid pills in the morning; it's because they are used to the structure of an oligopoly." Voice will consist of less than 1 percent of network traffic by the year 2004, Nacchio said. The majority of telecommunications will be in the form of packets -- little bits of data that carry video, audio and e-mail. The bottleneck, Nacchio said, is bandwidth. A native New Yorker, Nacchio paraphrased former FCC chairman Reed Hundt: "We need a data network that can carry voice rather than a voice network struggling to carry data." When Qwest has completed laying 16,000 miles of fiber-optic network in 18 months, it will be selling capacity by the barrel, Nacchio said. The company is burying hardened conduit 4 to 5 feet deep in railway beds. The twin conduits each contain 48 fiber optic cables, with each cable having a capacity of 8 gigabits. While the network is being finished, Qwest is aggressively selling service in Colorado for $4.50 a month and charging 10 cents a minutes at any time of the day. "TCP/IP is fast shaping networks -- public and private," he said. "The networks are hosting powerful applications, and they are becoming powerful applications," said Nacchio, adding that new users are being added at the rate of 5,000 an hour. "The digital age is about convergence and about the smarts coming inside the networks," he said.