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Technology Stocks : TLAB info? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JMD who wrote (2625)	6/27/1998 3:45:00 PM
From: Beltropolis Boy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7342

>OTOH, maybe CABLESPAN, or satellite links, or LMDS, or ADSL will >ride to the rescue. All that seems clear is that the last mile puzzle >ain't been solved yet! mike. at the risk of citing more financial mag/rag material, you may be interested in a smartmoney article posted yesterday. some decent discussion on the merits of xDSL (particularly ADSL) vice cable. a few excerpts: The Other Broadband Internet Play June 26, 1998 "What DSL does [for telephone companies] is it extends their investment in copper plants," says David Smith, vice president at Technology Futures. That's crucial, because with the wide-scale deployment of high-speed fiber optic wires at least a decade away, copper is the only game in town for most local carriers. [T]he push to provide ADSL modems en masse, which has previously been a lot more talk than action, is heating up. "I believe AT&T buying TCI actually accelerates the telco deployment of ADSL," says Steve Levy of Salomon Smith Barney. The telcos could use a jump-start, because in the race to provide homes with high-speed access, cable has a pretty good lead. There will be about 425,000 cable modem subscribers by year's end compared with only tens of thousands of residential DSL modem subscribers, according to the Yankee Group, a telecommunications research outfit. But both groups are expected to grow posthaste. In 2002, more than 3.35 million homes will get their Internet access through cable and 2.65 million through ADSL and DSL-Lite (an ADSL cousin), says the Yankee Group's Craig Driscoll. ADSL's growth will stem, in part, from a couple of advantages that it holds over cable. First, cable modems have what Smith calls a "summing problem." They're fast as a hungry cheetah when only one person on the block has one, but once all the neighbors sign on, the network slows. ADSL modems don't face that problem. Second, and perhaps more importantly, telephone networks are already set up to handle two-way traffic. According to Driscoll, only one-quarter of cable plants are equipped for the give-and-take of voice and data transmission. Upgrading the rest of those plants will take time. smartmoney.com