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

To: bucky89 who wrote (51618)	8/4/1998 10:43:00 PM
From: Raj	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

Hi bucky89, >>This is an artificial cost difference. The majority of the difference is a result of Universal Access Fees which must be paid for circuit-switched voice. The gov will not forever let QWEST and their VoIP go untaxed.<<< Universal access fees are paid by IXCs to the points of origination and termination of calls. If a call originate from a LEC and bridges over to a QWST VoIP backbone via a gateway (e.g LCI), somebody (e.g. LCI)is paying the access charges. You can bypass it if lets say a SOHO connects its intranet directly into a QWEST backbone. Either case, the cost efficiency over current circuit switches is around an order magnitude without consideration of access charges. I agree congestion will lead to ATM....but that's an argument about whether to do a) IP switching over the native wire protocol (i.e SONET/SDH or DWDM) vs. b)IP over ATM over SONET etc. In the case "a" you need to have sophisticated end-to-end flow control while in "b" you rely on mapping flows on SVCs. I don't think that "b" is unsolvable leading to voice over ATM. Time will tell. Raj