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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (50994)	7/31/1998 3:04:00 PM
From: Mighty Mizzou	Respond to of 61433

For a dumb medium it sure is popular. My whole neighborhood looks like a war zone because of telcos putting in underground fibre. Even my cable company is switching their trunk lines to fibre. I see fibre everywhere. Pete

To: The Phoenix who wrote (50994)	7/31/1998 11:06:00 PM
From: devans	Respond to of 61433

It's not the fiber technology that's doing the squeezing...it's the software at higher layers that allow companies like ASND and CSCO to get more capability on that fiber. Fiber is a dumb medium. Not true. A carrier can squeeze 16 or more wavelengths of light down an existing cable by putting a magic box at either end of the cable. The alternative is to call Corning and a guy with a back-hoe and put in 15 more cables. We all know which is the more attractive solution. Providing those magic boxes will be a good business because running new cables around is very expensive. Witness the past decades in which we've been cramming more and more bits down the PSTN's local loop. How many generations of modems have there been? A few companies who were pushing the leading edge of that technology did O.K. working with that dumb medium :) And there is still money to be made cramming more bits down the local loop with xDSL. Doesn't NT have something like $1B in orders for their 1-Meg Modem switches (sort-of an ADSL-lite technology). Layer-1 may not be sexy, and the competition is historically fierce, but there is lots of money to be made by the bright and quick...