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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (244)	2/21/1999 6:39:00 PM
From: JimLeo	Respond to of 54805

Cable modems (ATHM vs. ADSL). Both technologies will likely coexist for the next several years. ADSL suffers from from some serious weaknesses. You need to live within a couple of miles of your phone companies central office to get true high speed connections. Also there are problems with noise and interference from other services offered over the pairs of wires in the bundle that leaves the central office. For first generation ADSL the phone company has to send out a truck to add a splitter on the side of your house. That turns out to be very expensive for them. Although MSFT and INTC are pushing for ADSL lite (splitterless),if you talk with people in the industry you hear that there still seems to be technical problems with it. Cable modems also have technical problems. The original cable plant is mostly one way broadcast. To introduce cablemodems or phone service for that matter the plant has to be updated. That is why TCI needs AT&T. They need the capital to upgrade their plant. AT&T is willing to pay for it because they want to offer voice service over the plant and want to be sure that it is done right. Additionally, the Broadband cable pipe into your house is currently carrying a lot of analog video. The result is that if you get several hundred cable modem users on the same branch of a cable network you all share the digital bandwidth and your throughput goes way down. I've heard that @home limits streaming video to <2 minutes to prevent users from eating to much bandwidth. So both have technical limitations that are being worked but neither is going to eliminate the other for a while. In fact while they battle it out Wireless access like LMDS to satellite are sneaking up. So before long we will have more choices. JimLeo