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Technology Stocks : (LVLT) - Level 3 Communications -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SDR-SI who wrote (1050)	6/8/1998 12:33:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 3873

Steve, you ask: >>Does the decision to use the FORE say anything to you about Level 3's recent acquisition of XCOM, whose IP equipment and technology was to be at the "forefront" of L3's system implementation. Does the FORE decision represent a change in approach or just another means of getting the information into the system?<< Probably a lot of the latter, and a little bit of the former, since I think that their ATM decision most likely runs wider than the XCOM set of circumstances. In viewing their web site... xcom.net ...XCOM shows SONET, ISDN, analog 33.6 and 56k technologies, and for a company that bills itself as the data phone company, ATM is conspicuously absent from their topology maps and narrative descriptions. Of course, ATM could aggregate all of those other forms into a single pipe, but somehow it just doesn't seem to me that the XCOM consideration was paramount here. Again, I think it goes wider than that. Large enterprise nets are using ATM with increasing acceptance at the network edge as the collection and distribution technology of choice in aggregating much of their traffic flows over a single (or two or three pipes, for diversity and redundancy purposes). This is in contrast to previous approaches employed, whereby every disparate form of traffic, in discrete quantities, had their own line, usually hundreds, thousands of individual lines or channels to administer after, in large company locations. Tremendous savings are enjoyed, both financially (through drastic reductions in physical loop and port count) and admini$tratively, when all forms of traffic, including IP, can be harnessed into a single or a couple of pipes. I think that LVLT came to realize this need to be compliant with what the rest of the world was showing a tendency towards, on their own. Regards, Frank Coluccio