DSL Prime News Briefs

Speeds are increasing, and key players in the industry are on the move.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV [June 23, 2008]

Briefs

• AT&T is going to offer 25 megabit downloads on U-verse, Ralph de la Vega said at the last Gigaom conference. Unlike the "up to 24 megabits" service that more typically is 8 to 12, expect the U-verse service to be rock solid. It's the same circuit used for IPTV, ADSL3/VDSL at less than 3,000 feet. Currently, AT&T won't sell more than 10 megabits, reserving the rest of the bandwidth for itself. "If people don't want our TV offering, that's fine and we'll just sell them the bandwidth." De La Vega carefully noted this isn't an announcement, and it may be a while before consumers will get the 25 Mbps service. Ralph, who was a standout years ago as the BellSouth DSL guy, is now running AT&T Wireless and playing an important role as public spokesman. Also from BellSouth, Bill Smith has taken over running the AT&T network. Chris Rice, former CTO, has shifted over to a different job.
  
  
• Peace between the USTA and TIA hasn't seemed to help attendance at their newly joined conference. The word from Las Vegas is "Moderate attendance characterizes show; no major announcements." If my travel budget weren't so limited these days, I would have wanted to go if only for the session where the Bell CTOs come together. I try not to miss a chance to listen to people like that.
  
  
• AT&T is considering investing in Spice Telecom, a 4 million subscriber Indian mobile player currently controlled by Telecom Malaysia and the Modi family (Economic Times.) Randall has visited both India and the Emirates, looking for investments in a region of fast growth. It's yet one more way he's making it "Randall's AT&T", after years of AT&T selling off foreign investments in order to buy back stock. They pulled out of Telekom South Africa, TeleDenmark, Belgacom, and Bell Canada. They did retain their 9 percent share in Telmex, while Carlos Slim of Telmex is possibly the largest non-financial investor in AT&T.
  
  
• Telkom South Africa may fire 20,000 people and massively outsource, per Solidarity spokesperson Jaco Kleynhans. Engineering News, South Africa, was not able to get a comment or confirmation from Telkom. Neotel, controlled by Tata, has finally given SA a second national operator.
  
  
• Bezeq in Israel added 7,000 ADSL lines to 970,000, the smallest gain in several years. They are seeing strong cable competition and the market is 80 percent saturated. The government is considering structural separation.
  
  
• India's mobile growth "slowed" in April. The GSM carriers reported only 6.14 million new customers, so including the CDMA folks, the total is only around 8 million. They are now up to 270 million, passing the U.S.' 258 million phone lines.

Press

• Ray Le Maistre at Light Reading believes Ben Verwaayen is heading the short list at Alcatel if Pat Russo, as rumored, is being pushed out. The real story of how Verwaayan was pushed out at BT is still unreported, but he has a very strong reputation in the industry.

People

• Charlie Hoffman is no longer with Covad Communications, I was sorry to discover from a returned e-mail. Pat Bennett, a Covad veteran, is interim CEO. Charlie had been very optimistic about the recent buyout by Platinum Equity, so his rapid departure is unexpected. Charlie writes, " It was an appropriate time for me to do something else. I'm serving on some interesting boards, Synchronoss Technologies and Chordiant Software, and will evaluate other opportunities over the next few months. Pat Bennett has been a colleague of mine since 1993. We have worked together at four different companies, SBC, Sprint PCS, Rogers Wireless, where he was my COO, and Covad. He'll do a great job for Covad."
  
  
• Martin Thunman for years has inspired me with the dream of open fiber networks. EU Commissioner Redding has come to the same conclusion link here His company, PacketFront, was an early leader and now has shipped over a billion dollars in gear. Vivanne Redding at the EU and a new OECD paper are both supporting active over passive fiber, because it's much easier to unbundle. PacketFront has been very successful in the Emirates and is competing with Cisco for many of the key European rollouts. PacketFront Co-Founder Niclas Sonesson has taken over as the new CEO.
  
  
• Eugene Roman of Bell Canada proudly announced Rosewood Estates Winery & Meadery of Beamsville is releasing their 2006 meads and wines, including a cherry mead and eight wine varieties. Eugene, a senior technologist, has kept bees since he was six as part of his family tradition and in 2000 purchased 40 acres of Niagra land. The winery, about an hour from Toronto, is open six days a week. Eugene writes he "helped connect all the tanks into a 'winenet' so that he can monitor fermentation as each tank progresses. Next he'll be Wi-Fi-ing the vineyard to monitor weather at 'hotspots' in the vineyard." I think he's joking.
  
  
• Kevin Walsh can't resist a startup, so now he's a founder of Zeugma. Their Zeugma Service Node will "allow broadband service providers to identify, monitor, manage, and customize traffic flows on a per-service, per-subscriber level" very quickly. Their most interesting application is targeted video advertising; North America at least will be intolerant of extreme traffic shaping, so few carriers will invest heavily for that. The ZSN seems ideal for high volume man in the middle attacks for a company like Charter or CenturyTel.

Wall Street

• John Hodulik of UBS downrated both Verizon and AT&T last Monday, costing each about $2 billion and more in market cap on Tuesday. Hodulik years ago was one of the most articulate about the problems telcos were facing from cable, VoIP, underinvestment, etc. A while back, he decided the consistently high earnings and cashflow SBC was posting would push the stock up, and the market followed his expectations. So everyone watches his ratings very closely.
  
  
• Conexant sales are coming in at the high range of guidance, and Jeffries raised the stock to buy.

DSL Prime Years ago

October 8, 2000: Besides the Broadcom/E-14 deal, DSL Prime reported, "Hanaro of Korea, over 1 million subscribers, is looking for new investors as well as further vendor financing. Cisco is advancing $200 million, and Lucent $120 million." Today, vendor financing is long gone (as is Lucent) except for Huawei and occasionally a company like Alcatel matching Huawei.

Copyright 2008 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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