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Technology Stocks : AT&T -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: limtex who wrote (1513)	6/30/1998 1:37:00 PM
From: webpilot	Respond to of 4298

yihsuen, limtex, You can only force so much down that cable then you run out of bandwidth. One thing is for sure, looking out into the future, with hdtv on the horizon, each network will require more and more bandwidth on that cable, something will have to give. What would I look at if I were ATT or AOL or any other company with vision? I would go after the company with the most wireless bandwidth that I could. Who is that? Paxson Communications. They have a reach out to 74 million households out of a total of 98 million households. An unbelievable amount of bandwidth. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize the possibilities. Just by multiplying out a small percentage of market share, it shows that it would yield enormous revenues. AOL for example has very little infrastructure but a tremendous amount of subscribers. These subscribers are not loyalists, they are going for the cheapest and fastest service that they can get. AOL is going to be at risk where retaining customers is an issue. It does not look like they have done the necessary planning. Look at what happened to many of the original ISPs. As an ATT shareholder I would be very upset at spending that amount of money for that few customers. But the worst part of it is that they are buying an unreliable method of delivery. The cable where I live is unreliable at best, repairs are slow. If I am going to spend that amount of money I would insist upon state of the art or something that with a reasonable additional investment would result in a state of the art system. Let us not forget, the initial cost is one thing, the real costs will be measured down the road when you start operating. There is no comparison between the costs of maintaining cable vs. maintaining wireless. The whole video industry will be changing with the advent of hdtv. Each station will be able to broadcast up to 9 channels over the air. They will be banding together in major metropolitan areas and supplying the public with many many free channels. The question that remains open, is cable really necessary? What is the real value of cable looking out 5 years? They are being led, they are not the leaders that they should be.