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Non-Tech : Amati investors -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MangoBoy who wrote (28608)	11/12/1997 1:10:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 31386

[Intel and ADSL] <<<I'll bet that Intel's participation in this Alcatel demo is to highlight Intel's USB technology and that Intel contributed nothing on the ADSL side.>>> I'm basing my comments on what Intel told my engineer friend who's been corresponding with them for several months. Pat

To: MangoBoy who wrote (28608)	11/12/1997 2:45:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Respond to of 31386

[e-Commerce from InterNet Week] <<< Column: Take It From Wall Street: E-Commerce Is Serious Business If you have any remaining doubt that Internet commerce is going mainstream, maybe the following data point will put you over the top. Charles Schwab & Co., a household name in the stock-trading business, now conducts a staggering 39 percent of all trades electronically, and more than half of that takes place on the Web. That's right, nearly a quarter of Schwab's entire business has made the transition to a medium that is, by most measurements, just entering its teething stage. So you don't need a wild imagination to envision all the hair pulling behind the scenes of last month's stock market mania. With billions of shares changing hands in just one day, Wall Street's IT managers got the wake-up call of their lives when they realized that the weight of the global economy was on their shoulders--and it was all coming dangerously close to collapsing on top of them. The networks held up, but just barely. Servers were churning their little microprocessors out, and still many investors were shut out for hours at a time. Those fortunate enough to log on were greeted with nail-biting delays that ended up costing a number of brokerages millions in refunds. Wall Streeters we talked to said they got the message loud and clear: The network is now the heart of the business, and iit needs to be upgraded--and fast. Those of you who work in downtown Manhattan should expect to see a lot of double-parked trucks lining the streets over the next few months, what with all the hardware that's being ordered. "We're using the recent events as a benchmark for where we need to be insofar as capacity, and then we're doubling it," said Gideon Sasson, president of Schwab's electronic brokerage unit. IT managers on Wall Street and elsewhere are coming to realize that even brief bandwidth outages can be costly. As a result, many of them are diversifying their connectivity paths by setting up redundant access services through multiple providers that offer "burstable" services for scaling up bandwidth virtually on demand. ISPs, in turn, must respond to this evolution with a greater emphasis on quality of service. One-size-fits-all just won't cut it for the mammoth firms that deal in multibillion-dollar equities over IP networks. They need to know that the bandwidth will be there, and you can bet your portfolio they're willing to pay for it if it means recovering millions in potential losses from dissatisfied customers. Another startling realization is the amount of work that needs to be done in the way of Web standards. Several executives who oversee Internet brokerages said the Web's lack of persistence caused a lot of the headaches. That is, unlike a circuit-switched telephone call that holds onto its connection once initiated, the Web requires a separate "call" for each individual request--one for a stock-quote lookup, another for a form submission and yet another to execute a trade. Each ping is like digital fat clogging the Web's arteries. In addition, the math-intensive nature of encryption--a must for secure transactions--is enough to bog down systems even with light traffic loads. The real vexing part of the whole equation is the level of scrutiny IT managers have to give not only to their own networks but to those of their partners. Much of the stock information that finds its way onto, say, CNNfn's Web site originated under layers of information providers, each with its own access bridge and each with a different hosting and bandwidth provider. That means you have to demand the same performance of your partners' networks--and their providers' networks--as you do for your own. It's foreseeable that third-party audits are going to play a bigger role in evaluating the performance levels of potential information partners all the way down the food chain. [Who you going to trust, your cable company or telco???] Is there a lesson here that extends beyond the financial markets? You better believe it. For one thing, you should realize that just because a customer comes in over the Web doesn't mean he's any less serious about service quality. Any business considering a commitment to electronic commerce should learn from Wall Street's mistakes and prepare its network well ahead of time for traffic spikes. It's no longer good enough to drop catalog software onto the nearest vacant server. You must apply the same business-critical standards to your online ventures as you do to the rest of the shop and architect a system that will hold up under the most extreme conditions. Your customers will accept no less. By David Joachim>>>