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

To: Mohan Srinivasan who wrote (24270)	11/21/1997 5:33:00 AM
From: Joseph Pareti	Respond to of 61433

to all : does any of you agree that 3com will become more and more a key competitor of ASND ? The quest by 3com for higher margins in what Eric defines "telecommunications access device" will pit them in the remote access market place, that is Ascend bread and butter as far as I understand it. Consider the following excerpt's from Forbes (Jeffrey Young ) and from a recent interview with Eric. So what's Benhamou's solution to 3Com's lack of competitiveness in high-margin products? Create a new category. Benhamou is now hawking a "telecommunications access device" that would "let network administrators take charge of their data traffic." The switch/router would determine what traffic goes to the Internet, what goes over the public telephone network, what needs the higher capacities of advanced data transmission techniques. 3Com claims it can route local network traffic at astonishing packet speeds--4 million to 56 million packets per second, versus 1 million maximum for Cisco-style routers. Excerpt from an interview with Eric Benhahamou www4.techstocks.com A key difference between future networks and today's networks is connectivity on an end-to-end basis. And for us the end of the connectivity chain is literally where the user is; at the computer, at the desktop, at the server, and sometimes the user may not even use a classical computer. The user may be an application, it could be a connected organizer. It could be a set top. So for us, connectivity ends there. Another key difference is that future networks have to be dramatically more intelligent in terms of being aware of who the user is, what the application does, what the policy is that they should use to move the bits around. It is fair to say that the products the industry has produced to date have basically done a good job at moving bits faster and cheaper from one generation to the next. But they have not really fundamentally changed what they do. What is changing now is that we really have to look in the bit stream, and can no longer just solve all the problems by going faster and adding bandwidth. We have to intelligently treat and process this bit stream based upon some pre-defined policies. In our view, a lot of this policy intelligence will have to reside in the client access point. If you rely on the core network to make all of the policy decisions, this will result in a completely unmanageable, exorbitantly expensive situation.

To: Mohan Srinivasan who wrote (24270)	11/21/1997 7:09:00 AM
From: scott maragioglio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

Mohan, As I understand it the problem is w/ the TNT's signaling software w/ european central offices ( R2 signaling? ). Now they have to customize each TNT for each european CO somehow. I wish I could be more elaborate for you. As far as I know this is the only software problem left, and they are supposed to have that fixed by the end of the qt or early next qt.

To: Mohan Srinivasan who wrote (24270)	11/21/1997 10:08:00 AM
From: Sector Investor	Respond to of 61433

<<While this is probably not cause for a whole lot of concern for longer term investors, does anyone know precisely what the nature of these "problems" are ?>> I'm not positive, but the impression I've gotten is that these are not so much "problems" as desired features that are present in the MAX, but not TNT, and that users want these before they install the TNT. There may also be some Europe-specific or Japan-specific items. This could be things like management features, connectivity options, etc. No revenue is being lost, just deferred until orders are accepted.