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

To: KM who wrote (56978)	11/10/1998 11:14:00 AM
From: Ashley Campbell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

51 5/8! 52 Here we come!!!!

To: KM who wrote (56978)	11/10/1998 11:15:00 AM
From: H.A.M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

Investor's Business Daily Tuesday, November 10, 1998 Ascend Scales the Quick Rise of Net Services Internet service providers are moving beyond simply connecting people to the Web. ISPs and network service providers are building other services atop Internet access so they have more to sell to customers. And networking gear makers such as Ascend Communications Inc. want to help deliver those services and make some money for themselves. New or updated networking technology that's hitting the market this year should help provide these services. One such service is virtual private networks. VPNs let companies run private information over the public Internet. Another service is voice over Internet Protocol. This lets people make phone calls via the Internet or private networks. A technology called SS7, which Ascend and others are putting into their products, is emerging to help data and voice networks work as one. Kurt Bauer, Ascend's vice president of access product marketing, recently spoke with IBD about the evolving access market. IBD: What changes are happening in the market? Bauer: We're seeing some significant shifts. About 18 months ago, service providers as well as enterprise customers were really concentrated on ports (where a customer connects into the Internet), filling them up to capacity and installing them. But what we've been seeing is a strong movement from these same customers to add value-added services on top of this infrastructure. There are services like multivoice, multi- VPN, SS7 integration, or integrating the data network into the voice network. There are applications like network wholesaling, selling off excess capacity and wholesaling ports. Those are some of the value-added services that our service-provider (customers) are looking for. IBD: What's network wholesaling? Bauer: Basically . . . the ability for a large service provider to wholesale bandwidth or capacity on a network. You can think of (big phone firms) as retailers. They're the downstream service providers. Because they have the option to wholesale, they don't have to be in the facilities business and build it themselves, if they so choose. They can say, ''I want to (own my own network) in the major metropolitan areas, but I'm going to buy ports from TCI.net in Seattle and UUNet in San Diego,'' and add to their network in that way. That definitely has VPN aspects associated with it. The SS7 integration on the voice side is also important. IBD: How key is SS7? Bauer: We really view it as fundamental in this move toward the new public network. It's a network that's high capacity and designed for data. But because of its quality-of-service capabilities, it can handle simultaneous voice and data. The move toward that new (voice-data) network is going to require plugging into the intelligence of the voice network, which is embodied by SS7. IBD: How does SS7 work with voice over Internet Protocol? Bauer: The importance of SS7 is that it relates to voice of any kind. We want to view voice as a utility. We pick up the phone and we hit dial tone. I'm calling you and you're a user on the new public network. And I'm just dialing into a plain old (telephone) connection. You might be running voice over IP and I might be running on a regular phone. SS7 . . . ties the pieces together. IBD: Which technology do you think will win the so-called ''last mile'' - the connection from a network to the home? Bauer: We think that wireless will continue to be important. ISDN will have its place. So will the different modem technologies, DSL (ISDN and DSL speed data transmission over normal phone lines) in its various flavors, as well as cable. Cable looks like it's potentially going to be a really strong play. IBD: Have sales of access concentrators, which contain banks of modems, recovered after falling last year? Bauer: We see the market for access concentration becoming very solutions oriented. The companies that aren't oriented in that way are going to have problems. The folks who are selling ports aren't going to have what . . . the service providers are asking for. We see . . . new applications like fax, voice, video and VPNs driving port sales, but more from a solutions point of view. IBD: When you say solutions do you mean technology integrated into an overall service such as VPN, not just selling a box? Bauer: That's right. What service providers are looking for is a way to have a single infrastructure upon which they can build different types of services very quickly. IBD: Has the entry of Nortel Networks Ltd. and Lucent Technologies Inc. changed the access market? Bauer: They haven't really had much of an effect yet. Both of them have taken different tacks. The people in the front of this market are really Ascend and 3Com. Cisco is asserting itself into this market, as are Nortel and Lucent. I think the Nortel and Lucent expertise in voice will change some of the dynamics. But we also believe our acquisition of Stratus and integrating voice capability into our company will be a strong competitive edge for us.