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

To: Tim Luke who wrote (47073)	5/18/1998 9:26:00 AM
From: Neil H	Respond to of 61433

All Lynxus, Lucent Team On Hubs By John T. Mulqueen Two Atlanta entrepreneurs have teamed with Lucent Technologies Inc. to build the first two hubs in a national network of Internet service provider hubs. Tom Arcuragi and Michael Hamilton, CEO and president, respectively, of Lynxus said that Raleigh, N.C., and Minneapolis are the sites of the first hubs in their network. Initially the company plans to provide dial-up Internet access and XDSL services to residential and business customers. Lynxus plans to open hubs in Austin, Texas; Charlotte, N.C.; Nashville, Tenn.; Providence, R.I.; Phoenix; and Las Vegas later this year, both executives said. Arcuragi added that if the business takes off, 10 more hubs will be added in 1999. Lynxus also plans to provide dedicated T1 Internet access for businesses using the services of a start-up fixed wireless network operator that uses the 2.4-gigahertz spectrum, Arcuragi said. He would not name the carrier until the contract is signed. Each hub is designed to serve up to 25,000 customers and is an unmanned TNT switch from Ascend Communications Inc. with access gear from Paradyne Corp. that is co-located in the offices of a long distance carrier such as AT&T or a competitive local exchange carrier. The hubs will not be interconnected so there will be no backhauling of traffic, Arcuragi said. "We have designed the network so that each hub has its own dedicated access to the Internet," he said. "Depending on the size of the hub, they have two or three T1s. The goal is that by the end of the year, each will have a DS3.'' The design, installation and maintenance of these hubs is being handled by Lucent's NetCare Services arm, but Lynxus runs its own network operations center in Atlanta. Lucent built the call center for Lynxus and will handle overflow calls at Lucent's technical support facilities in St. Petersburg, Fla. Bob Correia, president of Pro-Tech Business Systems LLC, Smyrna, Ga., said he switched to Lynxus from Mindspring for his residential service because he never achieved better than a 19.2-kilobit-per-second Internet connection from Mindspring. Lynxus is never slower than 28.8 Kbps, he said. Correia said he is now moving his business to Lynxus from EarthLink Network for a 128-Kbps ISDN link, again because of problems with the EarthLink connection. Lynxus also will host a Web page for him, as well as provide E-mail, which is not part of its standard offering. Lynxus runs with fewer than 50 people, including three technicians in the network operations center, and staff in billing, telemarketing and accounting. "There are two people in administration-me and Mike," said Arcuragi. Lynxus is about to roll out a plan that establishes marketing partnerships with companies such as computer hardware and software retailers to get its message out, said Arcuragi and Hamilton. Hubs in different cities will be paid for by local investors, Arcuragi said. Cybernet Venture, a venture capital firm in Denver, has helped Lynxus raise enough funds to carry it through the next eight to 12 months, he added. "We are in the process of building a virtual corporation, and one asset in that is having Lucent," Hamilton said. "The problem we have is that we like people who want to work 70 hours a week." Jeff Akers, vice president of NetCare Services, said this is the first-but probably won't be the last-ISP for which NetCare will do this kind of work. He said that NetCare is building network centers for Advanced Radio Telecom Corp. (ART) (InternetWeek, March 16), which plans to offer fixed wireless services in the 38-GHz range. ART will not supply Lynxus with the wireless T1 lines, Arcuragi said. NetCare Services has outgrown the network monitoring business that Paradyne began in the late 1980s. Lucent divested Paradyne last year but kept NetCare. Akers said the unit now has 7,000 customers and has grown 80 percent to 100 percent in the past year. Customers can use multiple vendor networks. Lynxus chose Ascend's TNT switch over the PortMaster switch that Lucent acquired last year when it paid $650 million for Livingston Enterprises Inc. Akers said that a service company NetCare works with will provide products from any supplier requested by the customer. Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. Regards Neil