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Technology Stocks : Qwest Communications (Q) (formerly QWST) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SJS who wrote (716)	1/29/1998 11:21:00 AM
From: Shibumi	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 6846

>I am bascially asking the question: does this technology use a whole new fiber type which could have QWST redigging? Here's my understanding from reading several operational articles on Qwest -- the company uses specialized railroad cars outfitted to dig the trenches into which they lay conduit. This conduit is designed to be readily upgradeable. So I believe the answer is "no...Qwest won't be redigging when there are technological advances in fiber". The only risk I can see is that by increasing the available bandwidth supply that the served areas could develop a bandwidth surplus. However, since bandwidth demand appears to be driven by exponential factors I would think that this is a relatively small risk.

To: SJS who wrote (716)	1/29/1998 8:46:00 PM
From: Tim Bagwell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6846

Steve, The limitations I spoke of do not relate to the fiber itself. My concerns relate to the performance of fiber components such as filters, multiplexers, demultiplexers, system monitors and amplifiers. I suppose if Lucent were able to pull this off then QWST could upgrade their system to use LU equipment without any changes to the fiber itself. Of course, this would mean ripping out all the NT equipment. Nortel is, IMHO, way ahead of LU and if there is any merit to this claim I would expect NT to already be working on a competitive solution. But as I said, I think the LU claim is misleading. I suspect their claim may be based upon "potential capacity" which is never actually realized at any one place in the network at the same time.