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

To: bucky89 who wrote (51639)	8/5/1998 3:45:00 PM
From: Always_Wrong	Respond to of 61433

QWEST will cease to be a novelty, as all carriers will be doing VoIP. The thing that gets me... Why would the carriers need to do complex IP routing ($$) when basically they just need to get packetized voice (maybe at layer 2) over the new data networks.

To: bucky89 who wrote (51639)	8/5/1998 11:38:00 PM
From: Raj	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

Hi bucky89, >>Would you switch providers if a different provider offered you a $.02/minute discount from your current provider?<<< FWIW I gotta $0.10 discount on international calls from LCI over AT&T which I gladly took on my 2nd line. But I hear your point, today the overall cost savings is marginal. (I don't think there was any VoIP involved :) However, here's the million $ issue: The most recent research that I came across points to a growth in data traffic between 200% to 400% a year and accelerating...implying an exponential growth function in the near term. Extrapolate what happens when you get an order magnitude increase in traffic due to xDSL and cable modems at the edges. Contrast that to the cognoscenti suggesting a 8 to 10% growth in voice traffic. If you were QWEST, Level3 or anybody wanting to capitalize on this "real" growth in data (i.e IP) traffic, what kind of a backbone would you build. The prudent decision will be applying the 80 20 or 90 10 or 99.99 Limit->0 rule. The business decision would be to build an infrastructure that optimizes the flow of the majority IP traffic. But today's reality hits hard when you realize where most of the money is being made. It is carrying voice traffic. So if you had it your way and if technology was a commodity, you would select/elect a backbone network that would carry IP data traffic and was indifferent and invariant to the payload. A "stupid" network where the intelligence of the nature of data resided on the edges. A complete inversion of today's voice network. True if the enabling technology was a commodity. IMO (and acknowledging the congestion issue that you outlined): a) No tractable problem is unsolvable :-) b) technological progress is directly proportional to investment $ spent. VoIP will be here sooner than we think and will (voice) eventually be irrelevant! Raj