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

To: Al Klein who wrote (9656)	3/9/1998 7:58:00 PM
From: Zephod	Respond to of 21342

>>>Although the article's title appears negative towards DSL, upon closer reading Westell's xDSL products are mentioned very favorably. Al; My take exactly. With regard to the title, I think all Tim Greene is saying is don't believe claims of 7mb/s ADSL at this point, in real world conditions. Westell's FlexCap operates around 1.5mb/s. The article makes another important point about speed: "Customers might think speed is everything, but Avalon did not look at it that way. Web browsers cannot handle more than about 1.5M bit/sec worth of data anyway, so giving customers more bandwidth on the access link would not improve performance" Reading this article makes you wonder why US West went w/Netspeed over Westell. Avalon must have tested Netspeed's CAP modem. Maybe it has something to do with Paradyne's involvement? The article mentions the results will be posted at dsl.avalon.net later in the week. Should be interesting. While on the subject of US West, Hiram posted a link to an article a few weeks ago. I think it's worth posting. teledotcom.com US West Inc.'s !nterprise Networking Services (Denver) that it will make DSL service available to 5.5 million customers in 40 cities by midyear stands as a bright and shining moment. By US West's own estimates, the other 40 percent of its subscribers won't be able to get DSL for the foreseeable future. About 5 percent of those customers simply live too far from central offices to get DSL or are on local loops that are too poor in quality for high-speed service. The other 35 percent of customers are connected to digital loop carriers (DLCs). DLC avoidance has been a common practice in DSL trials and rollouts. Ultimately, though, it's an issue that will have to be addressed for DSL to become a ubiquitous offering. About 30 percent of all access lines in the U.S. are served off DLCs, says Sassan Babaie, vice president of marketing at Pulse Communications Inc. (Pulsecom, Herndon, Va.), a supplier of DLC equipment. The big problem for telcos is that DLCs are most likely to be in place where DSL demand may be highest, as in wealthy suburban communities located more than 18,000 feet from a central office, says Babaie. It's a problem that can only get bigger: Right now, about 50 percent of all new access lines are served off DLCs, and that proportion is growing every year, says John Webley, chief technology officer of Advanced Fibre Communications Inc. (AFC, Petaluma, Calif.), another DLC equipment supplier. Products that allow DSL to traverse DLCs are just becoming available, says Mike Donahue, ADSL product line manager for DSC Communications Corp. (Plano, Texas). DSC offers one such product, which it developed with Westell Technologies Inc. (Aurora, Ill.) and which is part of DSC's Litespan DLC line. The product costs about $1,100 per line, including the cost of customer premises gear, Donahue says. Bell Atlantic Corp. is now testing DSC's product in Northern Virginia. Dave