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

To: Gary Korn who wrote (35902)	2/23/1998 1:48:00 AM
From: Falcon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

they are fighting a tough war with cisco...I wonder if they can afford the resources to move into another area...although that in fact would help them even more when it comes to battling cisco because of a diversified product line wouldn't it..it seems to be the next logical step in its evolution.

To: Gary Korn who wrote (35902)	2/23/1998 2:56:00 AM
From: Marc Hyman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

ASND started with an ISP product, RAS. It moved to a RBOC/CLEC product, ATM. Pretty much all of its moves have been in the WAN arena. Some history. Ascend (founded as Aria) was an ISDN company. Its first product (shipped after the company became Ascend) was the ISDN equivalent of a modem rack. I think 9 or 10 of them were installed. The corporate "mission" changed from ISDN to public switched digital network (PSDN) access and the product changed to an inverse mux box that was great for video conferencing. Then in early '93, just as the original max (no tcp/ip, an imux only box) was being shipped work started on LAN/WAN bridging and routing. Eventually this lead to the MAX and the TNT as they are known today. Two things happened to the PSDN mission along the way: one was support for frame relay and other leased services. The PSDN company was turning into a PDN company. The second thing was the addition of modems and POTS lines. Now the modems may be 'digital', put with POTS support I suppose the company turned into a PN (public networking) access company. Now we hear about VPNs and I'd guess the "public" part of the corporate mission is gone. Recently a lot has been made of Ascend in the date network core, so I guess the access part is gone, too. It's taken about 8 years to get from an ISDN company to a networking company. I think that's a good thing. Your guess is as good as mine as to where they go from here. // marc