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

To: pat mudge who wrote (41757)	3/31/1998 11:18:00 PM
From: Jack Colton	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 61433

To: pat mudge From: Jack Colton Tuesday, Mar 31 1998 11:14PM EST -Preview- Pat, I know David Nelsen, and have met him while taking ATM classes at Fore. I do not agree with him on several key points: 1. Carriers will become the preferred sales channels, and the influence of today's one-stop shopping mergers and acquisitions will wane. I am not sure what he considers a carriers. I do not think he means the RBOCs, or AT&T. If anything, my observation is that the performance level of personnel (from those companies) related to "advanced network services" is exactly why many private companies invest in their own Network Administrative staffs. As we put into place more and more private ATM networks, we (my company and other Network Integrators) establish a reputation, in a lot of our accounts, of technical expertise that can not be found in the carriers or other "systems integrators." The downside, for me and other Network Integrators, is that it takes an incredible amount of training to keep up with the different manufacturers - and proper configuration of their equipment. It is very much like attending graduate school in electrical engineering, and never getting to graduate. Because of this high level of expertise and continuous training, I do not see the carriers of being able to provide enough network engineers to engineer all of the corporate and government networks that are out there. Highly trained personnel don't grow on trees, unfortunately. And there is a lot of difference between the theory of how some of the "advanced communications protocols" are supposed to work, and how they get implemented in a Cisco, Bay, Fore, Ascend or NN switch / router. Each manufacturer has their own way of attaching edge devices, and they have their own ways of lan emulation - outside of the standards. As advanced protocols start to gain wide spread acceptance, the private Network Integrators stand more to benefit than the carriers. It is a specialty, kind of like sports medicine. If you have a stab wound, you want to go to the nearest large hospital where they take all stabbing victims. If you have a ripped ligament in your knee, you want to go to a knee specialist. 2. The combined cost of switches, ports, circuits, network management, and service administration was rising out of proportion to revenue. Well, this one is pretty obvious. Implementing ATM is so much cheaper... <vbg> - I have written before on the thread about what I think about ATM in pipes larger than 10GBPS. I think that carriers (who have such large backbones) will ask themselves, "Why break everything up into little bitty packets?" The scheme of ATM is great in a MultiService collapsed backbone environments where pipes below 10 GBPS are in use. But people that I talk to, that are planning bigger backbones, are suprisingly against ATM use over those backbones. I personally love ATM, and I like establishing service for our customers. WIN98 has an ATM stack native to the operating system. So, we will definitely see an explosion in ATM growth, and as a result, we should have secure investments in our manufacturers.