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

To: Tim Luke who wrote (57077)	11/12/1998 12:39:00 PM
From: Immi	Respond to of 61433

ascend/mciworldcom deal due to this??? eBay Suffers From Traffic Congestion (11/12/98 9:11 a.m. ET) By Amy Rogers, Computer Reseller News High-flying online auction house eBay hit some bumps this week, when a glitch at the MAE West NAP threatened to derail sales. Users of the site, which lets consumers buy and sell collectable items -- everything from Beanie Babies to Elvis memorabilia to baseball cards -- complained of agonizing waits for pages to download. "This has been going on for over a week," said one user in an e-mail to eBay's help desk. "We are talking several minutes to access a page, or a time-out with no access." Customer-service representatives at San Jose, Calif.-based eBay, which uses ISP Exodus Communications, in Santa Clara, Calif., as its primary Web-hosting facility, said the company conducted tests and was "able to pinpoint the problem within the MCI network at a NAP named mae-west3.fddi.mci.net." "The bad news is except for reporting the problem to MCI, there is not much else we can do to remedy the slow access problems," said the customer-service rep. "The good news is we are talking with Exodus about getting connectivity through an additional ISP, which will allow for a choice between best routes." Exodus officials would not comment on the situation. An MCI-WorldCom spokeswoman said the company recently installed new Cisco ATM switches to try to alleviate the congestion at MAE West, the NAP located in San Jose, which could be contributing to eBay's woes. Exodus, an MCI-WorldCom customer, uses FDDI technology and is one of the customers MCI-WorldCom is upgrading to ATM, the spokeswoman said. In fact, eBay has taken some steps to solve the problem. Notations on eBay's announcement log on its website indicated the company had enlisted the aid of ISPs Savvis Communications, Uunet, and Alternet to try to improve the slow response times. New parts have been ordered from Inc. to fortify eBay's own network hardware but, as of Tuesday, those parts had still not arrived. "A company like eBay with IPO money in their coffers can easily address this [problem] with multiporting and buying more routers and more servers," said Vernon Keenan, analyst with Keenan Vision, in San Francisco. "Cisco knows we need it, and is doing its best to get it to us," said Mike Wilson, vice president of product development and site operations at eBay. Despite the snafus, shares of eBay, on a steep upward trajectory in recent weeks, were trading at $118.88 at midday Wednesday.