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Technology Stocks : Voice-on-the-net (VON), VoIP, Internet (IP) Telephony -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bernard Levy who wrote (886)	7/2/1998 9:20:00 PM
From: MangoBoy	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3178

seems to me that VDSL, being asymmetric, would likely remain targetted toward residential customers. business customers need at least as more if not more upstream bandwidth vs. downstream: VOIP and video telephony are symmetric, and most companies have high-traffic websites serving content to the web. "reversed" VDSL would better fit business bandwidth requirements.

To: Bernard Levy who wrote (886)	7/2/1998 9:58:00 PM
From: Ray Jensen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3178

Bernard, <<We all know that fiber to the building is not competitive for most buildings because of high trenching costs,>> Actually, fiber to the business district + HDSL is a very common, almost routine deployment mode for many telcos today to provision T1 data services to businesses, such as within a business park. Once a single business customer or location orders lots (say 10 or more) of T1 services, or any data rate service higher than T1 (such as DS3), fiber to the business customer building becomes the telco design by default. Fiber to the building is cost competitive for many buildings and business customers today where there is adequate demand for data services. Unlike in many residential areas, most telco engineers place fairly liberal quantities of 4" diameter PVC conduits in the streets in new business areas during initial construction, to assure access for future fiber and copper cables without digging for every new service reinforcement. (Off topic, Most CLECs just love this telco practice, because thanks to the FCC, they can come along and lease vacant ducts for much less than the cost to build!) Fiber cable is very cheap and easy to design and build, if there is vacant conduit in the ground (or it is along an aerial pole lead.) (Even if there is no completely vacant duct, you can override a innerduct in the same main duct as a small to medium sized copper cable, and then pull through the fiber.) Trenching is a last resort. On a per foot cost to build basis, fiber is comparable to a 50 pair copper cable. The big costs associated with fiber are usually the terminating opto-electronic devices, such as SONET or asynchronous fiber muxes. Trouble is, most any fiber job takes time, and we're talking 4 weeks easy. Visit the site, design the job, get materials, schedule crews to build, and finally turn up the circuits with the end electronics. Meanwhile, Joe's Wireless Services offers to turn up a wireless DS3 for a competitive price within 48 hrs, and its bye bye customer. If symmetric VDSL over short copper loops becomes ready for mass market deployment that would allow a 45 mbps DS3 to be installed onto a 2000' copper loop, it might find a fair number of telco buyers, especially in response to the timing problem described above. Yes, it would allow a a DS3 service order completion time that is competitive with a wireless provider, if fiber was pre-provisioned to all the right business places. That's already a present tense marching order for most telcos anyway. Maybe fiber+ symmetric VDSL would be only a temporary means to give service, until there is time to come back and serve the customer with fiber. Either way, I'm sure its going to show up on sales brochures of hardware vendors in the not too distant future. Ray.

To: Bernard Levy who wrote (886)	7/4/1998 9:56:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 3178

Bernard, I think that you and others here would simply be amazed (and some horrified) to see what is being installed in lieu of bona fide T1s and xDSL by some ISPs in many urban buildings, such as the scenario you've mentioned. The rush to make buildings "plug and go" in Manhattan, for example, has led to the deployment of Ethernet distribution schemes throughout buildings, under the guise of dedicated services, secure, and unlimited bandwidth, etc. In reality, some of these are nothing more than Ethernet Switche feeds, barely filtered at the port level, using bursting techniques on the carrier side to allow for min/max committed information rates, like Frame Relay. Sometimes these 'switches' are mounted in the landlords premises next to their LAN Administrator's console, sometimes in slop sink areas, sometimes in the easement area where the carriers drop their fiber mux connections. Not very secure, not very reliable, not very anything I'd like to be associated with, in fact. Often, in order to meet district tax abatement criteria (i.e., making the building "plug and go" capable), a landlord will "partner" with an SP to get these furnishings installed. What a sham(bles)! Has anyone else here witnessed such installations taking place anywhere else, similar to the one I've described here? Curious. Regards, Frank C.