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Microcap & Penny Stocks : FRANKLIN TELECOM (FTEL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pat Garaffa who wrote (22266)	11/26/1997 1:58:00 PM
From: Bill France	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 41046

Pat and all....not sure if this was posted before or not. Interesting, huh? Bill $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ FNET is going to be one of many networks in the marketplace. There are myriad ISPs that are going to try to band together (or get bought up by phone companies as seems to be happening more and more), there are behemoths like Worldcom/MCI who have their own backbone etc. So while it is true that FTEL is going to sell many gateways to FNET, it is by no means certain that the FTEL Tempest will corner the market in this space, mainly because they just don't have the port density needed by the big players. My feeling is that FTEL is going to do fine in the small gateway market but I don't expect them to be shipping 96 ports and up in a box anytime soon. But there is a market for smaller port counts too and so there is reason for optimism. As far as standards not being important, I have to totally disagree. FTEL will be an island if they don't support the standards. I'm sure they aren't going to let that happen. And corporate managers are notorious for wanting "standards" as opposed to quality (MS DOS vs Apple) <g>. But FTEL will support the standards I'm sure - the question is whether they will also support the port densities. It is good that FTEL has an ATM story - but their OC-3 card has a bandwidth of 155 Mbps, their Voice side can only support maybe 3-4 T1 spans in the same box (4 boards per T1, 16 slots in a chassis) - that's not even 5 Mbps wasting a lot of bandwidth. They need higher port counts on the voice side to be bigger players in this space since soon someone else will be able to put an OC-3 card together with the higher voice port counts and come up with similar voice quality and much higher bandwidth usage. -Atin