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

To: polarisnh who wrote (45331)	4/24/1998 5:14:00 PM
From: bucky89	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 61433

Steven, A potential challenger for Cisco? Well, like I said in a previous message, the only possibility I see is to catch Cisco napping on the next technology revolution in networking. The equivalent of how IBM was caught sleeping by the emergence of PC's, after feeling safe and content with their dependence on mainframes. In the same way, Cisco might feel safe today with routers. But the problem with routers and IP technology is it is connectionless, and cannot discriminate among different types of network traffic. Without major modifications it can't prioritize voice traffic or give certain priority to a particular customer who pays a little extra money. I think the next networking revolution will address this issue, and I believe it will be through ATM technology. ATM is connection oriented, and has QoS features built-in. It is a scalable and proven technology in ISP and carrier networks. By combining the best of ATM and IP, we can overcome the issues which plague the public internet today. The players which are most equipped to accomplish this today I believe are Cisco, Ascend, and Newbridge. I'm not too familiar with FORE. Cisco might be handicapped from their dependence on routers, and reluctant to let ATM cannibalize their router revenue. That seems to be what has happened to Stratacom today. They went from being an ATM/FR market leader to playing second fiddle to routers in Cisco's networking empire. Ascend and Newbridge are handicapped simply because they don't have the market clout in networking that Cisco has. That's why I believe a Lucent or Nortel combination with either one of these could be effective in challenging Cisco. As far as Bay and 3Com, I don't feel very good about either of these players. Bay has no strategy at all in place to deliver QoS. Their strategy is to engineer the best standards-compliant technology possible. The problem here is the standards always lag the leading edge of the pioneers. If Bay succeeds in their strategy, they will have the best implementation of yesterday's technology. IMO, Bay will die a slow death and eventually be taken over (I mean under). Meanwhile, 3Com is a manufacturer of commodity products (modems and NICs). They are too burdened looking after the revenues that they get from commodity products to be focused on new technology. They aren't going to challenge Cisco because they can't. Bucky89