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Technology Stocks : Westell WSTL -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: matt gray who wrote (13828)	11/2/1998 11:30:00 PM
From: Chemsync	Respond to of 21342

<<, the net cannot handle the spec performance of either technology and probably won't be able to handle the thru put for a couple of years>> Might be Matt. But, Forbes sees aggregation routing as a ready answer. See: forbes.com By Jeffrey S. Young There's a new kind of box out in the network these days. It sits between the Internet and the "last mile" to the home. It's called an aggregation router. The implications of this are enormous. In the high-speed world, an ISP could soon become much closer to a cable company like TCI. Numerous specialty Internet "channels" will be available to the end user at the click of an icon. Each one can be billed separately, based on time and packets or some other metric, and all will move through these new generation aggregation routers that can immediately and simultaneously provide varying services based on pricing and other metrics that can be changed on the fly. Sometimes in the technology arena, through chance or the marketing efforts of a number of companies, a phrase becomes freighted with more meaning than it should have. It gets bandied about in situations both appropriate and not, and then enters into the public consciousness. At that point the problem for an investor or savvy technology watcher is to be able to separate the legitimate business opportunity in the issue from the hype. The latest of these phrases, ubiquituous today in any discussion of the delivery of broadband (read high-speed) Internet to the masses, is the "last mile." Don't be taken in. Those last 10,000 feet or so from a telephone company switch to a home are very long feet indeed, made problematic by touchy wiring and uncertain standards. Yet the size of the market in terms of homes and users is so vast that it blinds many observers. The overemphasis on this grail of modern-day technology obscures the part of the high-speed equation where the real revolution is going to take place. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Those last 10,000 feet or so from a telephone company switch to a home are very long feet indeed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "In the next couple of years we are going to have to grow our network from about 900,000 ports [networking connection points] to more than 50 million just to keep up with scheduled growth," says Jim McManus, vice president of UUNet, the Internet carrier division of WorldComn in Fairfax, Va. He admits that he has "his checkbook out but few are listening. Our network's real growth isn't going to be in big fast routers--we already have about 60 of them, and we'll probably eventually get to 100--which is not that big a market opportunity for Cisco or Juniper even at the high prices of so-called gigabit routers. The big chance is in supplying what we call aggregation routers--products that can let us scale our high-speed offerings to millions of subscribers easily. For every state-of-the-art fast router, we need about 100 of these. This is one of the sweet spots in the networking market, and for some reason it has been ignored by the press and most of the industry." The truth about enabling lots of high-speed access to the web in homes and offices across the U.S., is that it requires an infrastructure to handle not just more packets--1,000 people at 2 Megabits per second is 2 Gigabits of network bandwidth (or peak capacity), compared with 1,000 times 56 Kilobits, or 5 Megabits, today for a typical dial-up connection. This is 500 times as much as existing capacity, and it all needs to be in place before the broadband Internet revolution can start to happen. But perhaps more important, and certainly more intriguingly, the move to broadband also requires a new set of gear in the network infrastructure that can manage all those high-speed data streams. This is an opportunity for the big telecommunications gear makers, and the giant networking companies. But so far, this raging market segment is dominated by a handful of small and nimble networking startups that are fast to market and have seized this space. Can they hold on? Give me high speed or give me death