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Strategies & Market Trends : Working All Day, But Trading Behind the Bosses Back Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark[ox5] who wrote (455)	2/6/1999 6:25:00 PM
From: lazarre	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 779

Essentially, Facilities Based means that the transmitter of voice/data/video owns the hardware and software that makes it all happen: from the routers and switches to the fibre and wire above and below ground. Important to know cause alot of the companies in telcom and in the ISP space are not facilities based. Usually these guys become profitable sooner than Facilities Based guys cause they did not have to spend boatloads of dough ( nor incur debt ) building out capacity (by the way Facilities Based can apply to just a leaser of capacity or a guy who does it all---offering both the service and the servive it runs on --- the capacity ). Good, almost always, in the short term and only sometimes in the long term. Most ISPs and alot of the CLECS are not facilities based and need to rent or lease capacity ( fiber or cable or both ) from FB guys like QWEST or, well, IIXC ( yeah! ). Advantages of being FB are the expectations that when you finally dig your way outta debt, everything you make goes directly to the bottom line ( AND IN SPADES ) DO NOT PASS GO, kaching, kaching. Now something very interesting happened just a few weeks ago that speaks volumes to the importance of being an FB carrier or both......YES, you guessed it : @Home buying EXCITE. And here's the real corker....@Home is not FB, they lease their offering of HiSpeed Cable into the home! Amazing; and they bought EXCITE on the basis of their Everest like evaluation ( aka market cap ) which, imo, had absolutely no freakin merit at all. These guys have only 50K customers in the universe, give me a break!! That said, here's where it really gets interestin'. Somma the FB guys are beginning to do weird things just recently like: offering web hosting to businesses , like starting their own commercially oriented ISPs ( could you or I be next? ) in select markets. They have the capacity, why not leverage it and, jeepers, the barriers to entry are alot lower than going thru local ordinances, state and fed regulatory hurdles; then diggin' the street, layin the glass and Big Pipe and connecting it to those things that CISCO makes. BTW, Mark, an FB that also provides the actual data/voice and video on its own Pipe, Glass and Cable is RCNC. And all you wanted was a brief script. Laz