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

To: Raptech who wrote (1583)	7/16/1998 8:07:00 PM
From: George the Greek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4298

If the deal were to fall apart I gather that the responsible party has to paid a US$1.75B termination fee. Would this apply if TCI stockholders reject, or only if TCI management autonomously backs out? George

To: Raptech who wrote (1583)	7/23/1998 2:32:00 AM
From: Darren DeNunzio	Respond to of 4298

The state of the VoIP market We have seen in the past months a desperate attempt to quash the inevitable approaching end to telephone monopolies. The carriers know that it is coming and are trying everything in their power to derail it. And unfortunately, it appears to be working. The explosion in growth that was seen in the VoIP market early this year has actually been in regression. As an example look at the recent stock price of some of the players, and compare them to the value when they peaked earlier this year. ============================================== Symbol Peak Price Recent Price ============================================== VOCLF 33 7/8 13 1/2 NSPK 32 1/4 10 11/16 FTEL 10 1/8 1 13/16 NMSS 45 11/16 11 3/16 OZEMY 28 1/8 21 3/8 INTL 27 1/4 16 3/4 DLGC 46 7/8 36 Although partially responsible for the decline in these companies stock prices, we can not give the big telco's all of the credit. Some of the blame must be placed on the companies themselves. As the VoIP hysteria began to emerge, many of these companies announced their intentions to provide a VoIP solution. Each company independently set out to design their system, hoping that their solution would be accepted as, or would be compatible with, the standard. H.323 was designed to transport packets using a modified version of TCP referred to as RTP or Real Time Protocol. Each RTP packet contained within it, additional information that was necessary for features like Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management (RSVP) and accounting. These RTP packets would be marshaled by a modified gateway referred to as a Gatekeeper. These Gatekeepers were responsible not only for the routing of each packet, but also to allocated bandwidth that would be reserved for a particular task. So in essence, these Gateways were actually hybrid routers. These companies did not have the engineers on staff to design such an animal. Most of these companies employed x-telco engineers, trained to think in terms of a switch. They were doomed from the start. What was needed were engineers that had experience in designing reliable high capacity routers. While these companies attempted to convert a switch-based network to a packet-based network (similar to taking a cassette tape deck and making it play CD's), Cisco was busy redesigning their routers to include these features found in RTP. A job easily accomplished, and quickly delivered. Beginning with the 3600 Series, delivered in April of this year, Cisco has delivered a router to carry live voice traffic (for example, telephone calls and faxes) over an IP network. The system provides features such as toll bypass, remote PBX presence over WANs, unified voice/data trunking and POTS-Internet telephony gateways. Then early last month Cisco introduced the AS5300 which allows a server to carry voice traffic, telephone calls and faxes over an IP network, all controlled by software. By adding their VoIP feature card (VFC) one can then utilizes the Cisco AS5300's quad T1/E1 Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) interface and local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN) routing capabilities to provide up to a 48/60 channel gateway for VoIP packetized voice traffic. VoIP on the Cisco AS5300 has two primary applications: 1) Providing a central-site telephony termination facility for VoIP traffic from multiple voice-equipped remote office facilities. 2) Providing a PSTN gateway for Internet telephone traffic. VoIP used as a PSTN gateway leverages the standardized use of H.323-based Internet telephone client applications. The routers can be fine-tuned to adequately support VoIP using a series of protocols and features geared toward QoS. Cisco's IOS software provides many tools for enabling QoS on a backbone, such as Random Early Detection (RED), Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED), Fancy Queuing (meaning custom, priority, or weighted fair queuing), and IP Precedence. Cisco has allowed for scalability by allowing the spreading of tasks among various routers. This eliminates the load placed on any one router and allows for the integration of existing legacy systems. For instance an edge router might be configured to perfume such tasks as packet classification, admission control and bandwidth management. While the backbone router may be configured to perform high-speed switching and transport, congestion and queue management. If you take all of this functionality and add in the fact that over eighty percent of the world is powered by Cisco routers, what would be the result. Well I would call it a standard.