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

To: pat mudge who wrote (48085)	6/5/1998 1:11:00 PM
From: bucky89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

Hi Pat, I'm responding to your message: Thanks for the good report from ATM Year'98. Since I own ASND and NN, I'm feeling a bit torn. According to the following article, MPOA is the accepted Internetworking standard adopted by the ATM Forum. MPOA is the ATM Forum's standard, but that doesn't necessarily mean the ISP's will buy it. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the ATM Forum. Even Raj Sharma, the Newbridge guy mentioned in your post and whose presentation I sat in on yesterday, acknowledged that MPOA has its limits. MPOA is best suited for campus environments, and it is a very complex technology which is difficult to scale to large ISP networks. I think the ISP's are looking for a better solution--either POS or ATM. That seems to be the battle right now. Both technologies (POS and ATM) are supposedly to be unified with the MPLS standard when it is ratified early next year. If you look closely at the AT&T announcement, you'll notice that they are recommending Newbridge to their customers, who operate smaller campus networks. As for AT&T's own production network, they are deploying Ascend. That is because only MPLS will scale to the size that AT&T requires. From the NN conference call, I understand MPLS is for non-business applications and MPOA for business. Well, perhaps you mean MPOA be targeted more towards the enterprise and MPLS towards the carrier market. I would agree with this. Of course, there will be exceptions, like with Fore/Level 3. When you mention the only companies shipping with MPLS, I notice Cisco among them. If they're superior why didn't AT&T choose their products instead of NN's? The same with C&W and BT? Cisco's MPLS is also known as Tag Switching. It does not use ATM VC's, although the implementation does use their BPX switches. I understand that it does not have the same QoS mechanisms that are built into ATM. This might be one reason why most carriers have rejected it. Carriers are going for Ascend's MPLS, not Newbridge's MPOA. I see Nortel as Ascend's primary MPLS/ATM competition with their Passport line, which they are aggressively marketing toward carriers and ISP's. Nortel has integrating virtual router capabilities with ATM/MPLS in their Passport product. This product has clearly been engineered for service providers, not enterprise customers. bucky89