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

To: blankmind who wrote (830)	1/4/1998 9:23:00 PM
From: DHB	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1629

A little dated, the link is part of a many part survey from the economist on telecommunications. While ASND is never mentioned by name in any of it, it provides a great worldwide view of expected growth and competition etc. economist.com Old wires, new content But there are 100m American homes. Only two-thirds of them are cabled, and many of those are linked to older systems than Comcast's, which will cost too much to upgrade quickly. For most Americans, and most people in the rest of the world, the best hope of tasting Microsoft's delights will be their local telephone company. So Microsoft's second bet is a trial with GTE, one of the livelier American telephone companies, to use a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology to shoot high-speed data across the telephone wires in Seattle. "We hope that DSL will be in as good a position by the end of 1998 as cable modems will be at the end of 1997," says Mr Myhrvold cautiously. If DSL ever becomes affordable and reliable, it might kill off the market for cable modems. For whereas the cable companies need to upgrade their entire networks, the telephone companies merely have to install a modem at the customer's end and a corresponding device in the central system. George Conrades, once the head of BBN, one of the companies that built the Internet, and now GTE's head of Internetworking, says the trials suggest moving pictures can be sent across those copper wires. But that does not mean the technology will be cheap. If Americans have to choose between paying a large premium for DSL and getting ordinary Internet access at a bargain-basement rate, how many of them will switch? GTE may be excited but some of the Bells, preoccupied with their battle with the long-distance companies, have been cutting back their investment in broadband. Indeed, as long as the Bells fear they may have to share their capacity with competitors for no reward, this sort of investment may go slowly. No wonder Mr Gates is making a third bet, on Teledesic: one of a number of schemes to launch a bevy of low-orbiting satellites that will deliver broadband communications to anybody, anywhere, who has a small receiving dish. When it starts, early in the next century, it will offer "instant infrastructure," says Denis Gilhooly, Teledesic's head of business development. That will matter not just in America, but even more in the developing world, a market Teledesic is keen to cultivate. "Instant infrastructure anywhere in Africa would have an enormous economic impact," says Mr Gilhooly. Indeed, a global market for broadband communications would transform not just the communications industry, but the way the world works. *"Digital Tornado: The Internet and Telecommunications Policy". OPP Working Paper, Series 29, Kevin Werbach. FCC, March 1997