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

To: djane who wrote (44328)	4/14/1998 7:00:00 PM
From: djane	Respond to of 61433

After crippling outage, AT&T tackles customer relations By John Rendleman, PC Week Online 04.14.98 2:39 pm ET zdnet.com As engineers worked through last night and into today to restore service on AT&T's frame-relay network, Chairman Michael Armstrong dispatched a personal letter to the CEOs of each of the company's thousands of frame-relay customers apologizing for a massive 20-hour outage. The total failure of the network began Monday as a software or hardware glitch between two of the 145 Cisco/Stratacom frame-relay switches in the network quickly escalated into a complete service disruption to all frame-relay customers. "Frankly, these outages let our customers down, and I want to apologize to each and every one of them," Armstrong said during a news conference today. To help make amends, AT&T will suspend all charges for frame-relay service from the time the outage occurred until the company has identified and corrected the problem and implemented systems to prevent similar outages in the future. "We will not charge customers for frame-relay service until we have defined the problem and identified a solution," Armstrong said, adding that AT&T also sent a technical letter from Frank Ianna, executive vice president of network and computing services, to the CIOs and telecom managers of AT&T's frame relay customers explaining the extent of the problem. The outage undoubtedly will have long-term implications for AT&T, which has traditionally been considered the premier provider of wide area frame-relay services in terms of reliability and network performance. While the outage lasted, in excess of 5,000 corporations were unable to complete critical network-based business. Retailers, for example, were unable to authorize credit-card payments and financial institutions could not complete transactions. For those customers, "the network is the very heart of their business, and that is what we were affecting [with the frame-relay failure]," Armstrong said. AT&T provided select customers with regular updates every 15 or 20 minutes throughout the crisis, particularly in cases involving customers with critical applications. The New York-based telecommunications giant also worked closely with customers that had pre-existing backup service arrangements with AT&T, officials said. In the hours when the outage was most severe, AT&T engineers focused first on identifying and isolating the problem, then on gradually restoring customer circuits on the network, according to Armstrong and Ianna. By 11:45 a.m. ET today, AT&T had restored 75 percent of its customer circuits, and by approximately 12:15 p.m. the company had 80 percent of its customers back online. The restoration rate reached 96 percent by 12:40 p.m. In the days to come, AT&T will investigate the as-yet-undetermined root cause of the failure between the two switches and devise a solution to prevent future occurrences, Ianna said. Send E-mail to PC Week \| Copyright notice

To: djane who wrote (44328)	4/14/1998 7:03:00 PM
From: djane	Respond to of 61433

Nortel buys into startup Avici for IP networking By Scott Berinato, PC Week Online 04.14.98 5:04 pm ET zdnet.com Northern Telecom Ltd. (NT) today extended its reach into carrier IP networking by partnering with startup Avici Systems Inc. The Brampton, Ontario, company announced it will take a 20 percent stake in Avici, of Chelmsford, Mass. As part of the deal, Mike Unger, president of Nortel's optics division, will take a seat on Avici's board. The terms of the agreement also call for cross-licensing and shared distribution and support. Officials would not divulge further details about the agreement. Avici, which was formed in 1996, is developing a terabit switch router to address increasing bandwidth demands on the public network. It will house 20 slots for line cards that each act as hardware-based routers with throughput capabilities of 70G bps. Although Avici had hoped to begin beta testing the product around this time, officials said today the router will enter beta by the end of the year. "We realized [that] one key building block we don't have [in our migration to IP] is a massively scalable carrier-grade backbone router/switch capable of carrying huge amounts of IP traffic," said Derek Oppen, vice president of business development for carrier-grade networks at Nortel. "We felt we needed to work with an acknowledged leader in the backbone space." But Avici-with one round of financing totaling $15.7 million-doesn't have a product out yet. That doesn't matter, according to one analyst. "CTOs at ISPs [Internet service providers] and large corporations don't see anything coming from the major networking companies," said Hilary Mine, an analyst at Probe Research Inc., in Cedar Knolls, N.J. "They're actually looking to smaller companies for terabit switch routing." "The bottom line is [that] this is good for both companies," Mine continued. "Avici gets the support lines no small company has, and Nortel continues to add to its IP strategy." Nortel can be reached at www.nortel.com. Avici is at www.avici.com. Send E-mail to PC Week \| Copyright notice

To: djane who wrote (44328)	4/14/1998 7:34:00 PM
From: Joseph Colombo	Respond to of 61433

<<Just for fun, I've outlined my ASND stock price prediction (assuming no buyout) until mid-1/99.>> djane, Good Post. Joe

To: djane who wrote (44328)	4/14/1998 7:42:00 PM
From: Jan Crawley	Respond to of 61433

4-6/98 40-45 trading range early 7/98 Spike up to 45 mid-7/98 Q298 earnings report. CX550 revenues 7-9/98 40-45 trading range late 9/98 45-50 trading range (10/88 LU buyout speculation increases) early 10/98 Spike up to 50 (continued LU buyout rumors; great compare to 10/97) mid-10/98 Q398 earnings report 10-12/98 50-55 trading range (buyout rumors; looking to 1999 $1.75+/sh estimates) early 1/99 Spike up to 60 (Q4 usually strong) mid-1/99 Q498 earnings report (FY1999 $1.75+/sh estimates) mid-1/99 65-70 trading range Djane, I really think that you are on target. Around 2K shares seems like a reasonable position for small investors like us to hold. I hope that none of my shares will be called away. Thank you very much and please keep up the good work. Jan