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Technology Stocks : WCOM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doughboy who wrote (4228)	4/23/1999 5:16:00 AM
From: JM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

Agree with your synopsis. My $0.02 FWIW: Att will make up the margin difference btwn residential and business with volume. With this deal they will have over 27 Million out of the over 100 million homes with cable tv. They will have to spend $$, but once upgraded, an HFC cable infrastructure can handle voice, data, video at very high speeds (speeds faster than ISDN,ASDL I believe). The cost per home for local access will be cheaper than laying new fiber, and will not face the regulatory scrutiny of an att trying to buy a regional local service provider. The communications pie is big enough for multiple profitable niches to be filled. Seems att is focusing on the consumer, while WCOM is focused on corporate business.

To: Doughboy who wrote (4228)	4/23/1999 6:48:00 AM
From: Robert Scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11568

They're dumb like a fox. While WCOM is so worried about it's stock price, T is investing for the future. Consider this: 1. Most of these cable customers will become local toll customers = greatly reduce the billions T pays in access charges to the Bells. 2. Bundled local, internet, long distance and wireless for their customers - one of the biggest problems for long distance carriers is churn - it's something like 9% per month - this means huge advertising expenses just to keep share. Bundling allows you to lock in customers! 3. Up to 16 million of their own customers in cable broadband. T will go down today and may drift below 50 over the near term but I view this as an opportunity to buy into one of the survivors in the coming HUGE telecom companies. Further, I don't think this will be the last cable asset they buy. The FCC has made it pretty clear that they want broadband rolled out and competition in the local loop and like TCI, I don't think they will stand in the way of this transaction. Just listened to Michael Armstrong on CNBC. He said that the dilution will be less than $.30 due to cost cutting and that the acquisition will increase cash flow by about 20%. I might also add that at the end of March, 1999 cable price regulation ended. It would not surprise me to see a slight increase of say 5% soon in cable rates.