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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lml who wrote (2647)	12/23/1998 3:25:00 PM
From: WTC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

lml- Reread the 12/17 ION announcement; you apparently have some confusion about what Sprint will build themselves. The key paragraph says, <Sprint's plans include deploying broadband enabling equipment, such as digital subscriber line access multiplexers(DSLAMS), broadly in major markets, initially to 1,000 central offices by early 2000, ultimately spanning more than 1,600 central offices. Sprint will lease the copper wires connecting customers to the central offices (known as unbundled local loops) from incumbent local inter-exchange carriers.> They are not planning to deploy any copper or fiber between ILEC central offices and customers. Now they intend to lease just the loops (previously they had a legal initiative to be allowed to lease the DSLAM slot and cards as well.) That means they intend to deploy the "broadband equipment", i.e., DSLAMS, et.al., themselves in great quantities very quickly. But, at this announcement juncture at least, they will not be leasing any cable plows. It is hard to see how this initiative would create any market forces that would act as additional incentive for the ILECs to deploy more fiber in the subscriber plant. Perhaps it is more likely that Sprint will try to use the ION initiative to create some spin and leverage in the legal/regulatory arena. It could be a tactic for Sprint to cry foul at the ILECs and complain about shortcomings in the ILEC UNE availability and procedures. If that compliant registers, it might help them keep the ILECs out of their long distance revenue streams a bit longer.

To: lml who wrote (2647)	12/23/1998 11:21:00 PM
From: Bill Lin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Sticking my nose in again. I think the best market forces to move the RBOCs to FTTN and FTTB is Teligent and Winstar. Both are Multi-Billion debt funded. Both are after Business customers in MTBs. Both want the phone business and throw in Data services as an enticement. Both say, "gimme your phone bill, here it is back with a 30% cut" Both are wireless (with Winstar having the larger bandwidth). Taking the RBOC's biz customer is serious. This will make them move, bigtime. Then, as the MTB model plus the National Service Provider model is proven for the Fortune Global 1000, other companies like QWEST and Level 3 will take away backbone business from the RBOCs, and even T. Right now ILECs are sitting fat and happy because their pipes are 60%+ full. But with all the fiber backbone coming on line, and DWDM dropping in price every year, the race will be to bring FTTN, FTTB to increase the value of service to the end user, and thus bring your dreams to fruition. Time frame: 25 years to completion, 50% complete in 15 years, 90% complete in 20 years. Cable HFC is only an attempt to use existing cable infrastructure, but loading is a big issue as the AtHome complaints in Fremont CA show. As DenverTechie commented, a typical node has 2000-4000 homes, which will max out the 30Meg bit/s channel rather quickly. (QoS? What's that? you just need 7.5kbits/sec or 800 bytes per sec) There is a way to switch more channels (from a cable TV channel to an Internet 30 meg channel) to alleviate the problem, but, geez, the current cable modems can't do that, and oh, the cable modem consortium would have to agree on which channels to eliminate, the upper or lower spectrum and then how to move the channels around, to maximize the revenue. This isn't hard to do, but it'll take another year, since they just did it. BL