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

To: Bindusagar Reddy who wrote (51880)	8/11/1998 1:33:00 AM
From: bucky89	Respond to of 61433

"ATM is an excellent technology for carriers that have to structure deployment strategies in an environment with constrained bandwidth," says Lew Wilks, president of Qwest Communications International's business markets unit in Denver. However, while Qwest's original intent was to build a "pure IP" network, market realities - ATM dominance on carrier backbones and the relative immaturity of IP switching technology - forced the carrier to implement ATM. (Playing into ASND's strength) Bucky what do you think about this? Bindusagar, I think this quote by Wilks shows there is a lot of uncertainty and disagreement over the future of ATM even within the management ranks of QWEST Corporation. The official QWEST party line is that they will deploy a pure IP network, and ATM only where demanded by customers. They can afford to do this because they have virtually unlimited bandwidth resources. Other legacy carriers like AT&T have serious bandwidth constraints, and they must use ATM to efficiently utilize scarce bandwidth resources. Should QWEST somehow become successful and attract enough customers to cause congestion in their network, they we may very well see them move to ATM, unless by that time IP has the QoS features that Cisco has been promising for eons. Otherwise, their VoIP will crap out if they don't move to ATM under this scenario. Level 3 is another carrier in a similar position to QWEST with unlimited bandwidth resources, and that is why they believe pure IP is the way to go. bucky89