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Technology Stocks : Newbridge Networks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (7150)	10/27/1998 10:30:00 PM
From: James Chan	Respond to of 18016

In the NBN interview tonight, John Roth said that Teligent equipment was from NT, and I believe Winstar is from LU. JC

To: pat mudge who wrote (7150)	10/28/1998 5:58:00 AM
From: Glenn McDougall	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18016

A great article on Newbridge in the National Post by Jill Vardy. nationalpost.com Newbridge trumpets telecom invention as a breakthrough Some are skeptical Company had developed a sort of X-ray for data transmissions. Ottawa. Every telecommunications equipment maker has tried - and failed - to come up with a gadget that tells it exactly what kind of signal is sent over a network. Now, Newbridge Networks Corp. says it has found the Holy Grail of network management - a way to differentiate between kinds of signals. And it plans to have telecom switches with the new feature on the market by March. "It sounds like a great idea. But I'm not sure how you'd practically implement it. You'd have to have an awfully efficient little algorithm," said Gurinder Parhar, a telecommunications analyst at HSBC Securities Inc. in Toronto. If the new system is proven to work, it could cement Newbridge's place as a major supplier of telecommunications equipment to large telephone and internet service companies. "This is really quite a revolution, to be able to pull a packet of data apart for identification...we do it extremely fast and for a stupidly low amount of money," Terry Matthews, Newbridge chairman and CEO, told the Financial Post. "I think we have a winner here, big-time." The company has applied for a patent on its system which was perfected just weeks ago. Identifying different signals is important because it allows a phone company to assign priorities to signals that can't wait for transmission during peak periods of data traffic. An e-mail, for example, can be put into a buffer and delayed a few seconds. A video-conferencing signal can-not. But here has been no way to tell which signal is which once it has been translated into digitized bits. At the heart of the solution is an intricate algorithm that can identify and mark signals at lightning-fast speed. Once you can identify the signals, you can assign them priority and charge customers according to that priority. "That means a [telecommunications] provider can say that for e-mail,I'm only going to charge you .001 cents per packet of signals because it can suffer a bit of delay in service. But for voice signals, which can't tolerate a delay, I'm going to charge you .1 cents per packet," Mr. Matthews explained. Kanata, Ontario based Newbridge is not the only company that has been working on this kind of product. Every telecommunications equipment manufacturer has tried to come up with a cheap solution to network management. "That's what everyone is working on feverishly right now, to make sure that on data networks they can guarantee quality of service. I'm not sure if anyone has got that nut cracked yet, to be able to charge by the type of date that's going around," said Marcia Wisniewski, technology analyst at First Associates, a brokerage in Toronto. California - based Cisco systems Inc., for example, has developed a system called tag switching. "By 'tagging' the first in a flow of data subsequent packets of related data re expedited to the final destination," Cisco explains on its Web site. Newbridge's algorithm takes that much further, Mr. Matthews says, by characterizing the content of the signal. "There's nothing on the market that does what ours does," he said. Mr. Matthews said the algorithm is a defining moment in network development; like the sudden discovery that automobiles run better if their hard rubber tires are replaced with inflated ones.