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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ted Jackson who wrote (16256)	8/24/1998 11:18:00 AM
From: mrknowitall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77400

Most of the "backbone" telephone network that carries everything (including the internet, voice, etc.), is already digital. Much of it is carried over SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) fiberoptic lines. In most cases today, you connect your PBX and your data network to the SONET network through the phone companies circuits. Your data network gets connected through products like CSCO's and your voice network through other types of products. Here's where it gets interesting; One of the more advanced technologies in use is ATM, which allows you to send voice, data, video, etc., across the SONET network. ATM switches essentially convert all the incoming data into carrier-transmittable form which the phone network carries (via SONET)to another ATM switch where it gets broken back out to wherever it's supposed to go. Imagine, though, that you're not the biggest company in town and can't afford the "overhead" of an ATM switch and a big pipe to carry voice traffic. With what is becoming available, in fact, you can directly take voice traffic, turn it into IP (data) traffic and put it into a device that joins it with a lot of other "internet" traffic without an ATM switch and the very-high-speed link it requires. Bluntly, ATM is for really big applications and the world isn't made up of just big users! Presently, we have some voice performance limitations - but that is rapidly becoming a moot-point as ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth become available on the internet - and one way to speed up the process is to put IP traffic directly into SONET rather than stuffing it into ATM. Where CISCO will try (IMHO) to "sell" to the phone companies is in niches where they want to make money in some kind of special service that requires specialized equipment - not in the big telephone switches or the SONET carrier equipment. The other target market are those companies that want to bypass the local phone companies completely, i.e., cable companies, wireless service providers and other "specialized" carriers. YES - CSCO will make money - they are VERY good at defining what their customers need and then building it profitably.