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Technology Stocks : Westell WSTL -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (8890)	1/13/1998 5:29:00 AM
From: Pigboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21342

Pat, Now that was a great post!! Now you like 3Com? I don't know about them. The whole DSL Lite thing is very interesting, and even the part about oeming to PC manufacturers. I will assume only high end PC's (certainly not all or a lot) will start shipping with such products if suh deals are struck for next xmas--like some high end PC's ship with DVD now. Alcatel seems like they are right there, so does that mean HAYZ will be making their DSL Lite modems? I also would like to find out WSTL's and PAiR's ideas on DSL DMT Lite. If TI makes a DSL Lite DSP, does that automatically make WSTL's modems that way if they use it? all imho pigboy

To: pat mudge who wrote (8890)	1/13/1998 11:00:00 AM
From: Chemsync	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21342

[Forbes] Great little post on the splitterless solution Pat Here's a recent article notable primarily for its source, Forbes. Reassuring to hear xDSL is not dead and acknowledged as such from a high profile mag. Have you read anything about the $300 million CETI (California Education Technology Plan). GTE, Microsoft, Fujitsu, and Hughes are the major contractors. Big school bonds for telecommunication in elementary schools are on ballots too. Law enforcement and public services are clamoring for their share of the pie. The high tech roll out continues.....sg Cancel that ISDN order By Andrew J. Kessler THOSE EUROPEAN TELEPHONE MONOPOLIES are about to get a sudden, severe lesson in price competition. When the dust settles, customers over there will be paying less for phone calls but making a lot more of them. It will be a painful transformation for the former monopolists. I predict that the same sort of upheaval will come to the U.S. data access market. The local telephone companies here have a business selling high-bandwidth links, called T-1 lines, at outlandish prices- typically $1,000 a month. These are lines that carry 1.54 megabits per second, or the equivalent of 28 conventional telephone lines. There is no reason in principle that T-1s cannot be made available at much lower rates-$100 or less. If high-bandwidth access could be made cheap, demand would explode. A T-1 is a godsend to someone trying to download graphic-rich Internet content. But the telcos do not exactly welcome the idea of cheap T-1s. A $100 T-1 would imply that a regular phone line is worth $4 a month. Telcos don't like that idea. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Try DSL. With this, you get 12 times the speed of ISDN service at half the price. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In lieu of offering dirt-cheap T-1s, the phone companies make a business of selling so-called ISDN service, which falls somewhere between T-1s and plain old telephone lines in price ($35 to $100 a month) and capacity (128 kilobits per second). Some Internet fans use ISDN lines to make their Web browsing go a little faster. My advice to those who are about to order an ISDN: Don't. Wait for a better deal to come along. I have two entry ramps to the Internet. At home I use a standard 28.8-kilobit modem, for which I ordered a second phone line. This line runs me about $20 per month, and the Internet access I get from Concentric Networks costs another $20 per month. I picked Concentric for my service provider because it is nationwide. Wherever I am, I can get E-mail at the charge of a local call (although hotels still rip me off for those, but that's another story). At work we have several people, each with a couple of computers, all trying to access the Internet. Rather then set up half a dozen phone lines for 28.8-kilobit access, we chose to have one shared high-speed connection to the Net. A T-1 cost too much, so we settled for an ISDN at 128 kilobits. We bought a $600 gizmo called WebRamp-a network hub, router and ISDN modem all in one. Then we ordered an ISDN line from PacBell. PacBell told us we would get the line in five weeks. We got it after five months. We use what is known as Centrex ISDN, a little-known tariff that cuts the rate to $35 per month if we only make calls within the same exchange. Luckily, we got access to the Internet through a local service, called MediaCity, that is based across the street and hence is on the same exchange. It charges us $357 per month. Total cost: around $400 per month, or $40 per month per Internet station. These are prices you would expect from a monopolist. But competition is coming, from companies like At Home (FORBES, Oct. 20, 1997), which uses cable television lines to provide high-speed Web access. PacBell is awake to the threat. Together with Concentric Networks, it is offering Internet users an attractive new service based on DSL (digital subscriber line) technology. With this, I will get 12 times the speed of my ISDN service at half the price, which is Internet access at T-1 speed. Because it works over regular phone lines without interrupting voice calls, customers won't have to order a second phone line for their computers. To avail yourself of this service, you need a fancy modem. I paid about $450 for the hardware, which includes a DSL modem made by Alcatel; a splitter, to aggregate the voice and data lines; and a 3Com network interface card, to hand off the signal to my PC. Since the service is half-price, the hardware has a two-month payback. PacBell is not straining to make DSL a huge success; that would only undercut its high-margin T-1 business. Clinging to its old profit margins, it is charging more to businesses than to individual consumers. I bet that doesn't last long. Concentric is reportedly cutting a deal with a nationwide reseller to push its service beyond California. The regional Bells will come around of their own free will or will be dragged, kicking and screaming. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Kessler (akessler@velcap.com) is a general partner of Velocity Capital Management, a technology and communications investment company in Palo Alto, Calif. ÿ By Andrew J. Kessler ÿ Columnists ÿ Parameters ÿ FromÿJanuaryÿ26,ÿ1998ÿIssue