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To: Ron Burns who wrote (572)	5/14/1998 7:17:00 PM
From: Hiram Walker	Respond to of 663

Ron, there is a ton of TCI news in CED magazine, most of the money is going to HLIT to upgrade their plant with Metrolink 8 channel DWDM. cedmagazine.com Here is some of it. Sniezko, who won the 1997 Polaris Award for fiber innovation, says DWDM technology is already "at cost parity today and headed (lower)" than traditional analog 1310 electronics. So, by spending the same amount of money, TCI gets similar performance, much more capacity, a simpler hub site and perhaps millions of dollars in real estate savings. In fact, Werner projects that real estate and rent savings could be on the order of $6 to $7 per home passed. Other considerations that TCI considers bonuses are the system's scalability and the fact that cable modem equipment, such as caching and proxy servers, can be moved back to the primary hub, which means they can be amortized over a larger number of subscribers. And because each of the eight optical wavelengths can accommodate up to 10 QAM digital video channels, TCI immediately can send 80 channels in the downstream direction. Should the day come when that's not enough, a relatively simple electronics change-out will provide even more capacity. And here is some more, The biggest news, of course, is upgrades. After slowing upgrade spending to nearly a trickle ($52 million) in 1997, TCI expects to spend about $1.8 billion over the next three years ($400 million in '98 and $700 million in both 1999 and 2000) for bandwidth and two-way upgrades. When finished, nearly 60 percent of TCI's plant (the portion in major urban markets) will be at least 550 MHz (with 1.8 million homes served by hybrid fiber/coax networks), while 90 percent will be two-way active (up from just three percent in 1997). Hiram