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Technology Stocks : General Instrument Corp.'98 (GIC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: flickerful who wrote (311)	6/10/1998 6:13:00 AM
From: Hiram Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 615

Flickerful and all,here is a good article about GIC and VDSL cedmagazine.com BellSouth proceeded with its New Orleans wireless cable launch amid preparations for several more wireless and HFC cable rollouts in the months ahead; Ameritech announced it was pursuing new franchises in Chicago and several other Midwest cities, expanding on a franchise base that now stands at over 1.1 million households; and GTE, rethinking its facilities platform, was reported to be scoring major successes against incumbent operators in Thousand Oaks, Calif. While these telcos are using a variety of network technologies to facilitate early expansion, their longer-term ambitions are founded on a consensus platform that has come out of nowhere in the past half year or so to dominate strategic planning. Known as "VDSL" (very high speed digital subscriber line), the platform is said to offer telcos the ability to terminate fiber as far as 4,000 feet away from the end user, and still deliver a full range of digital services at speeds of 13 to 52 megabits per second, depending on distance, over the copper pairs extending from the fiber nodes. In support of developing standards for the platform, BellSouth, GTE, SBC and Bell Canada have joined forces with Japan's NTT, seven European carriers and Telstra Corp. of Australia in a broadband initiative known as the "Full Service Access Network." At the same time, US West, with its Phoenix rollout, has become the first carrier to move ahead with widescale deployment of the VDSL platform. "For the first time, the carriers have a fiber-rich technology that leverages the last mile," says Bill Weeks, vice president for technology at NextLevel Communications, the privately-held entity that joined forces with General Instrument Corp. to form NextLevel Systems Inc. in '96 and has now been spun off to continue its focus on the telephone industry. "Until VDSL showed up, any fiber technology that came on the scene required ripping up backyards. Now, telcos can place the electronics at a feeder-based interface and enter the broadband market quickly." If the VDSL system works as billed, it will offer a more telco-network-friendly approach to launching a full slate of consumer broadband services than the other means tried so far, including hybrid fiber/coax, fiber-to-the-curb and wireless cable. This is because the system, using the same modulation techniques used in ADSL (asymmetrical DSL) but over shorter lengths of copper, allows telcos to provide video along with data services and POTS (plain old telephone service) over existing wires from fiber termination points that are at or within easy reach of fiber that's already in place. Hiram