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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ms. X who wrote (12361)	2/8/1998 3:42:00 PM
From: sepku	Respond to of 77400

Don't know if this was posted here yet...from ASND news-only, courtesy of Maverick. There is mention of CSCO Stratacom gear. ------------------------------------------------- Full Article on ASND's AT&T contract 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 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. Unlike 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] 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. END