Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : ANTEC Corp. (ANTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Judy Muldawer who wrote (325)	6/14/1998 6:08:00 PM
From: Hiram Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 847

Judy et all, a great article for ANTC. SCTE CABLE-TEC EXPO Sees Cable-Telephony Comeback By LESLIE ELLIS Denver -- Amid a rush of new services and technology to support them at last week's Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers Cable-Tec Expo here was a strong resurgence of cable-delivered telephony -- both cable- and packet-based. Cox Communications Inc. took the biggest validating leap, agreeing last Tuesday to spend $100 million in an exclusive, five-year contract with Antec Corp. for its "Cornerstone" cable-phone gear. Alex Best, senior vice president of engineering for Cox, reiterated the MSO's bullishness on cable telephony during a panel session here last Wednesday, saying that Cox will use the Antec gear in eight of its nine metro clusters. Specifically, watch for Cox to serve up cable-phone service in Orange County, Calif.; New England; San Diego; Phoenix; Hampton Roads, Va.; New Orleans; Omaha, Neb.; and Oklahoma City. Best said the deployments will happen because 83 percent of Cox's subscribers are located in the MSO's nine system clusters, and most of those systems will be upgraded for two-way capabilities and expanded bandwidth by the end of this year. Cox is deploying all three new service types -- digital video, high-speed data and cable telephony -- and Best ranked the services in that order in terms of ease of deployment. "Telephony -- that's not for the faint of heart," he admitted. "It's a little more difficult, and it helps if you already have [telephone] switches. Powering is an issue, and agreements with telcos are an issue." But the payoff, in terms of penetration and revenue, seems to be worth it, Best said. "We spend about $200 per home passed to upgrade our network, and we felt that we could get the greatest return on that investment if we leveraged our network to provide all of the services that were economically feasible -- and circuit-switched telephony is certainly one of those," he said. Notably, Best said, Cox anticipated a five-year time frame before it would reach a telephony-penetration level of 20 percent -- and it then reached that milestone after six months of offering phone service. "What we do know is that an RBOC [regional Bell operating company] customer will switch to a cable operator's telephone service," he said. Antec executives called the five-year deal "the largest deployment of the Cornerstone system to date." Jack Bryant, president of Antec Network Systems, said Cox is one of several top-10 MSOs with renewed interest in cable-telephone gear, and Antec was able to use the two-year demand lull to hone its Cornerstone product to its current, commercially viable state. "We're on the fifth software release in two-and-a-half years, and they're all feature enhancements," Bryant said, noting that a new Cornerstone subscriber unit is now in the works for a fourth-quarter release that is substantially smaller and that consumes less power than the existing unit. multichannel.com Lulls come in handy.