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

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 2:05:00 AM
From: Jan Crawley	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1629

Sorry. Error message.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 2:08:00 AM
From: Larry J.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1629

High-Speed Switching Standard Delayed at Least Until June: (Sorry thread, cant get URL to work) The gist of the article is that the Institute of Electrical Engineers failed to resolve technical issues concerning so-called gigabit Ethernet technology before adjourning its latest meeting. The delay in standards may cause corporate buyers to put off purchases of gigabit Ethernet networking products, or decide to go with competing technologies such as asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM, switches, market researcher Dell'Oro said. "People would rather buy standardized ATM than proprietary gigabit Etnernet." (Bloomberg)

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 5:25:00 PM
From: blankmind	Respond to of 1629

Cisco Systems: What Makes It So Special? Stock of the Day (Archive) - Feb 05, 1998 That phenomenal performance and consistent ability to live up to lofty expectations is reason enough for analysts to love Cisco. The outperformance of its stock is another. It's up more than 400% in the last 3 years, and something like 11,000% since it came public in the late-eighties. The stock has also weathered recent bouts of market instability rather well. While rivals Ascend and now 3Com have plunged over 60% amidst the Asian weakness and warnings of earnings disappointments, Cisco is only about 5% off its all-time high.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 7:53:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

Full Article on ASND's AT&T contract, Part I By David Rohde of Network World, NewYork [No online article yet, I have to type it from the print] Someone in the telecommunications industry does believe in Moore's Law after all. And of all the people, it turns out to be the chairman of AT&T. The carrier's new CEO, C. Michael Armstrong,last week announced a radical change in AT&T's network, which will provide hundreds of new users access points for IP, wireless, and local telephone services. Combined with a new effort to slash the company's head count and overhead, Armstrong indicated in public - and even more emphatically in private - that the plan is designed to bring down the cost of both voice and data networking for business users. Armstrong told a crowd of Wall Street and technical analysts here that AT&T will move to an edge switch architecture that terminates dedicated access lines on local telephone switches instead of AT&T's heavily taxed long-distance circuit switches. According to analysts and AT&T insiders, Armstrong and his deputies are also committed to installing a substantial number of new data switches at the edge of network to provide a transparent IP user interface. The idea, they says, is to beef up AT&T's WorldNet IP services with economically attractive offers that utilize FR or ATM trunking in the carrier backbone without forcing users to actually subscribe to frame or ATM services.[good opp for B-STDX 9000 and GX 550] Armstrong gave the clearest statement yet by a major telecom executive that some variant of Moore's Law - the dictum that computer processing power doubles every 18 months for the same cost - might eventually apply to telecom, as well. AT&T could count on selling more services to business and residential users as price stops being a barrier, Armstrong said. A major partner in AT&T's plan is expected to be Ascend Communications Corp., which last year purchased ATM switch vendor Cascade Communications Corp. Frank Ianna, AT&T's executive vice president for network and computing services, confirmed that AT&T this year plans to purchase 112 of Ascend's CBX 500 multiservice ATM backbone switches from the former Cascade family, plus 50 B-STDX 9000 edge switches with IP interface, largely to provide a transparent ATM backbone for what users will simply view as IP services. Ianna added that AT&T has a rapidly growing demand for native ATM services as big users max out their T-1 FR links.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 8:10:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

Full Article on ASND's AT&T contract, Part II To pay for these and other investments, AT&T has said it will cut 18,000 more jobs and reduce overhead to an industry standard 22% of revenues. It also has canceled a project to build a new proprietary superswitch for the network backbone as follow-up to the company's 4ESS switches.[Could it use ASND's OC-48 GX 550 ATM core switch?] Through it all, Armstrong gave some conservative projections for AT&T profit growth. That worried Wall Street, but gladdened IT analysts such as Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects, Inc, a Washington, D.C. consultant. "What he was saying is: Don't expect 'the savings' to be returned to the shareholders," Dzubeck said,"It's going to be returned to customers." Armstrong's plan is not guaranteed to succeed. An indication of the work remaining for AT&T was on display later in the week at ComNet, '98, where an announcement of AT&T's first set of standard FR service-level agreements (SLA) drews a lukewarm response. For example, AT&T said it will guarantee that 99.99% of packets up to the users subscribed to committed information rate (CIR) will pass through the network. Unlikke existing offers from MCI Communications Corp. and Sprint Corp., AT&T offered no guarantee for packets above CIR - the ones most at risk of loss. Analysts attributed the gaps in AT&T FR SLAs to Cisco Systems, Inc.'s Stratacom switches, on which AT&T's FR network is based. "They can't do much more than this with the Stratacom platform," Dzubeck said. Dzubeck also predicted that by next year, AT&T will de-emphasize new FR service and beef up end-to-end latency guarantees for its recently introduced WorldNet VPN service. [More opp for ASND's CBX 500 and GX 550]

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 8:19:00 PM
From: Maverick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1629

Full Article on ASND's AT&T Contract, Part III Ianna confirmed that AT&T is continuing to add to the Stratacom FR network, with a planned addition this year of 62 broadband switches to the existing 125-switch network [AT&T can use ASND's B-STDX 9000 155 Mb/s FR switch as opposed to STRM's 45 Mb/s BPX for ASND FR switch is faster and can interoperate w/ existing switches],plus several hundred new access nodes.[AT&T can use more CBX 500 and B-STDX 9000 edge switches here] "[AT&T wants to set an] aggressive target to cut costs...to make us competitive with our rivals of today and the future." C. Michael Armstrong, CEO of AT&T.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 8:47:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

ASND's new devices could ease 'Net bottlenecks Smart RAC can free up blocked telephone switches. By Tim Greene of Network World [I typed this up from the 2/2/98 print] Ascend and 3Com are teaching their RACs to talk to telephone voice switches. If successful, the plan could ease Internet bottlenecks and help migrate telephone networks to IP backbones of the future. Last week, both cos pledged to put telephone signaling technology in to their RACs, allowing the devices to take dial-up Internet calls off the voice telephone network. these long duration calls have been blamed for bogging down expensive telephone switches. Instead of buying more telephone voice switches, phone cos could buy these smart RACs - at a tenth of the cost , the two companies claimed Relieving the telephone switches could mean fewer failures when ISP customers try to dial in to the Internet. Later this year, ASND's MAX and 3Com's Total Control dial-up access switch lines will carry SSignaling System 7 (SS7) SW, the protocol stack telephone voice switches are used to signal call setup and release, among other things. SS7 SW will enable RACs to sit within the phone company network and receive calls from customers dialing in to ISPs. The calls then would be switched to high-speed trunks linking RACs to ISP points of presence. The RACs could fulfill that role as soon as the SW is complete. But with further intelligence, the RACs could be gateways between the public voice telephone NW as it exists today and the IP backbones that traditional carriers are working toward. Today, phone cos operate separate data and voice NWs, but they are starting the move toward single networks that handle both.[A new market opened up for for ASND] Putting voice on an IP backbone requires gateways that support the translation of voice-call signaling into IP addresses. In turn, those IP addresses must be associated w/ service-quality levels that support voice. With this in place, voice traffic could then ride with data over a single carrier backbone, thereby reducing carrier costs. With competition finally heating up, these savings might be passed along to customers. 3Com is expected to roll out SS7 upgrades to its Total COntrol chassis over the course of the year. ASND is expected to roll out voice over IP and SS7 support in the first quarter.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 8:49:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

Crowe betting $3 billion on the 'Net Monster IP network to blend with today's public Internet. By Tim Greene Network World, 2/2/98 James Crowe, the tough-minded CEO who built the former MFS into a plum that WorldCom, Inc. bought for $14 billion in 1996, believes the Internet is the network of the future. And he is sure it will improve as independent carriers with high-capacity networks and careful traffic management blend their resources into the mix of networks that is the Internet. Crowe now leads Level 3 Communications, Inc., a planned IP voice, data and video fiber-optic network already backed by $3 billion in assets from Kiewit Diversified Group, of Omaha, Neb. He recently talked to Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene about the future of Level 3 and the Net. How did you come up with the idea for this new network? Back in 1995, we were merrily building at MFS a fiber-based circuit-switched global network. Then, for a variety of reasons, we started looking at IP and the Internet. The more we looked, the more we came to the conclusion that business-oriented [Internet service providers] were in the same business as MFS; they just had a technology that was more cost-effective for lots of stuff in 1995 and was improving far more quickly than circuit-switched technology. You seem to rely on upcoming technology to provide quality of service, right? There is technical development needed. But there is also the process of showing customers that our business practices are such that we can be trusted with valuable mission-critical information. So you will use the Internet as part of your backbone? No one has a high-speed connection to everywhere. If [carriers do not] have a high-speed connection to Omaha, they dump it to somebody else who comes here. Do they use the Internet for their backbone? Yes, for some of their customers.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (1121)	2/5/1998 8:51:00 PM
From: Maverick	Respond to of 1629

Crow's Monster IP network, Part II So you want to be an integral part of the Internet, only make it more responsive? That's a good way of putting it. When you are up and running, you won't be selling frame relay service, for example, you'll be selling IP tone? When we're up and running, I would hope you would say, 'Why would I want to buy frame? I can buy the same service on an IP backbone at a lower cost with the kind of quality and reliability I need.' The job that we have is to make certain that our business customers trust us. What services will Level 3 offer? Today, as we speak, IP-based networks are suitable for [data traffic]. Over the next couple of years, we fully expect to see deployment of technologies that allow us to handle voice and video - tag switching, et cetera. Can you describe what your network hardware will look like beyond being based on data communications technology? Our goal is to build a network that can accommodate unpredictable technical change, if not elegantly, then more elegantly than our competitors. We think the road is littered with people who took a religious view of technology and then got surprised.