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

To: Clay Takaya who wrote (57561)	11/27/1998 11:32:00 AM
From: bucky89	Respond to of 61433

If only a dozen core switches are necessary to support this network and if all the complexity is in the edge, why would China Post make the ridiculous call of buying ASND edge switches and NN core switches? Clay, My point is ATM switches are a commodity. There are 101+ ATM vendors out there, many of them defunct by now. All of them have the basic capability of switching 53-byte ATM cells. The value that established vendors like Ascend and Newbridge bring in is their capability to integrate non-ATM protocols into an ATM network. That the CP chose Ascend to do this at the edge shows they have more confidence in Ascend's ability to integrate ATM in a multi-protocol environment. Why did they chose Newbridge over Ascend in the core? Two reasons I can think of: 1) Price--I have no doubt that Newbridge bid a lower price than Ascend. The CP chose the low-priced vendor where the product is essentially a commodity--that's the ATM core, like I just explained. However, they had to buy Ascend at the edge in order to get good multi-protocol capability. 2) Diversification of vendor sourcing. This is a very serious consideration and will prevent the CP from getting into a situation where most Enterprises are today with Cisco. Yes, they have the drawback of supporting multiple vendor solutions, and this is a very serious consideration. However, it appears the above two benefits outweigh this one negative. bucky89 bucky89