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

To: PiedPiper who wrote (9789)	3/18/1998 1:32:00 PM
From: Zephod	Respond to of 21342

>>>I heard that the street already knows about GTE Piper; While I don't doubt the credibility of your source I do doubt the accuracy of their information, especially if it came from someone at Westell. microsoft.com "GTE plans to end its trial and begin offering ADSL service to the public within three months, beginning in such towns as Redmond where the company already has installed ADSL equipment in its switching stations...When I joined the Microsoft-GTE trial last spring, GTE gave me an early ADSL modem from Westell that could download data at 1.5 Mbps, but upload only at a paltry 56K. I recently moved, and this week GTE visited my new home to reinstall ADSL. The installer brought a new Westell modem that downloads data at the same 1.5Mbps, but uploads data at speeds approaching 1 Mbps. Like my older Westell modem, this external modem connects to my PC through a standard Ethernet card. This article is only 4 weeks old, and as of the date this article was written, GTE was still installing Westell modems. We know no CAP modems are interoperable that means GTE has Westell in the switching stations. It's possible GTE might go to all the trouble to install Westell in the switching stations, change their minds, remove them to install another vendor, seems unlikely to me. Another point, GTE has never publicly mentioned using any vendors other than Amati and Westell. I stand by my earlier statement to you that if there were a signed contract very few people would know about it, especially employees of Westell, who would find out when the news was made public. I don't know how closely you followed Westell last fall but there was a lot of trading on insider information leading up to the merger announcement between Westell and Amati. In the days and weeks leading up to the merger the Amati Nov 17 call options went from an average volume of 20-50 contracts a day to 600-1000 a day. If the source of this information and the people who traded on it weren't investigated by the SEC they sure as hell should have been. This leak obviously came out of Westell, and you can bet management is not going to let it happen again. Unless your source is on the board, I'd be willing to bet they don't have the whole story. >>actually the numbers i have heard are in a range between 35 and 40, not 25-30 You mean to say that some dumb soul is going to pay 1.5bil for a company with less than 100 mil in sales? I have to agree with Trey on this, not in the current value of the company but in what they might consider a fair offer. During momentum mania in mid '96 when Carlton Lutz and the Cabot Market Timer drove the likes of Iomega and Presstek to unbelievable valuations and Westell was thought to be a shoe-in for the JPC, Westell had a market cap of almost 2 billion. There are people on this thread, Curly for one, who know a lot more about the Penney family and their relationship with the company than I, but from what I've been able to pick up, I get the impression the Penney's (who have 80% voting rights) are loyal to the company and its employees and wouldn't let the company go unless the offer was to good to turn down. (that's why IMO a buyout's not in the cards) Dave