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

To: Mighty Mizzou who wrote (57407)	11/23/1998 12:52:00 PM
From: The Phoenix	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61433

mighty, I agree with you about ASIC's and the movement from "traditional" routing. It's probably better to say layer 2 versus layer 3 rather than switching versus routing. Cisco is the king in layer 3 and will parlay this into bigger gains. This coupled with emmerging dominance in converged networks, cable headends, DSL, and continued dominance in the enterprise will mean CSCO continues to roll. To think otherwise is a mistake. ASND has great products as well yet they know that layer 2 networks are a thing of the past - thus IP Navigator. But, it's too little too late. Look at last quarter..the only company that really out-performed was CSCO... Now LU is warning??? or so someone was saying. NT's numbers sucked. But Cisco's book to bill is still over 1. Where's the business going?? I think this pretty much sends the message. OG

To: Mighty Mizzou who wrote (57407)	11/23/1998 1:20:00 PM
From: gfr fan	Respond to of 61433

<<This is ludicrous, the shift is clearly from router based networking to switched. It's all because of the ever increasing amount of ASICs built into the chips that will always make switches far more efficient and reliable than routers. It's only a matter of time before routers are obsolete.>> Mighty, you may want to research this. Routers are inherently more efficient based on their intelligence. I'd also say they are more reliable as their code base is much more mature. Software routing is dying, but routing in silicon (ASICs) will explode, and it will be the incumbent's to lose. Layer three expertise is still limited to a few companies - this has been an ASND achilles heel as NetStar's product has not been widely accepted. ASND will need to develop this if they want to continue to scale long term. ATM may survive as the transport layer, but IP packets will be riding on top of this for a long, long, time, as native ATM to the desktop ain't gonna happen (too bad for FORE).