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

To: Martin P. Smith who wrote (22297)	11/27/1997 10:12:00 AM
From: topwright	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41046

Martin, your points, as always, are valid. If I may, I'd like to add another dimension to ponder. Internet Telephony is in its infancy, and as can be expected will evolve at a rapid rate over the next few years. This presents an entirely different frame of mind in the eyes of many a potential customer. Obsolesence. In other words what is "todays state of the art" will sure to be "tomorrow's dinosaur." Since I-T has not been fully endorsed (nor embraced) as a viable aleternative to convential telephony, corporations will be very reluctant in laying out the "long bread." Especially when they know that hundreds of thousands of dollars may become obsolete with a stroke of a chime. In chasing down the story the other day, this factor was discussed. The projects leader that I spoke to, stated that Franklin offered a logical solution to this potential waste of capital, top quality at a reasonable price, and also had the expansion capacity or modularization to grow with the customers demand. He found this to be extremely appealing. Also stated that Franklin's Tempest was suited to a wide variety of tasks, but because the clarity of signal was the best of the bunch, the price was the final clincher. It was his opinion that Tempest's ability to handle up to a T-1 span was adequate under most circumstances, especially in a (satellite office) corporate enviornment. Asked if it would handle a large corporate headquarters, he said that there may be other high-end units that may be suited better for the task, but he saw no reason why Franklin's Tempest couldn't be stacked with multiple T-1's being split out of an OC-3 via another piece of equipment. Hmmmmmmmm! Bottom-line, the point I was making was that the Tempest allows a customer to enter into Internet Telephony without commiting to a humongous amount of capital, yet receive toll-line quality at a fraction of the cost. And the Tempest allows them to upgrade on a modular basis as technologies change and improvements are afforded. All this without having to scrap a large costly unit. Could be the deciding factor that gets Franklin out of the starting gate fast. RB

To: Martin P. Smith who wrote (22297)	11/27/1997 2:01:00 PM
From: Atin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41046

Martin: I mentioned software purely because in my experience the software needs to be upgraded, bug-fixed etc a lot quicker than the boards need to be replaced. Also, I didn't say 96 ports on a board but that will be coming out too. Basically this is Moore's law -- the density of transistors keeps increasing exponentially and this translates to higher density hardware (more ports etc). Your MTBF argument only works if you think of each port as an additional component, but what really happens is that the actual number of components used to manage the same resource becomes smaller as advances in design happen. It happened in PCs, it happened in wristwatches, it is happening in telephony. Again, it has been my impression that the FTEL Tempest's voice quality is one of a select few at the top of the quality heap. They're good, and I am happy with my investment and not thinking of selling anytime soon. But I am also not looking for them to turn the market upside down yet. They are behind in some parts of the spectrum, ahead in others. And yes, I have wondered what the technology they use to transfer vocoded data from the DSP board to the datacom is, and how open it etc. I asked the question here, and I will ask an FTEL engineer if I ever get one in front of me. -Atin