Another Write up about ANNI
GLTA Steve (ATL)
HAPPY EASTER TO EVERYONE!
The email we sent out yesterday (VIEW HERE), had an error in the following sentence: "Wednesday was the biggest daily point gain for the stock in almost 14 months!" The day was actually Thursday.
Now on to bigger things. This weekend, The Gilder Technology Report put out some info on Amedia Networks. The Gilder Technology Report is one of the biggest and most respected technology investment newsletters around. The newsletter seeks out new technology that has the ability to reshape the global economy. Below is what they said about Amedia.
The Week / Who’s Ahead in Broadband?
Likening himself to a plumber providing pipes for raw bandwidth, UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency) Executive Director Paul Morris correctly separates content from conduit. He shuns the temptations of the 1980s paradigm of cable TV—with hundreds of channels stuffed and stultified into about a dozen mass-market flavors—that has captivated AT&T (T) and most of its sister Bells. By contrast, in the long-tail world of Life After Television, it takes only a click or two to exfoliate cornucopian video—diversified into as many niches as books offered on Amazon (AMZN) or items for sale on eBay (EBAY).
But to get the bandwidth, we may have to move to Utah. (Morris’s broadband Ethernet network, partly powered by Amedia’s (OTCBB: AANI) Ethernet switched technology, is deployed by a consortium of 14 Utah cities.)
Paul first caught our attention with a table showing the orders of magnitude differences in cost of bandwidth per bit among the different broadband solutions and carriers. Measuring bandwidth per dollar per month, we can sum up the numbers: the various digital subscriber line solutions of BellSouth (BLS) and AT&T offer around 25 kilobits per second per dollar per month. The cable people at their best offer maybe four times more: around 100 kilobits per second per dollar per month. Laboring toward utopia on a Pilgrim’s Progress trek with a huge burden of new fangled TV and Hollywood programming on its back, Verizon (VZ) currently provides 200 kilobits per second per dollar per month. But over the next five years it promises to increase that number into the megabits per dollar per second per month with fiber to the home and premises. And Utopia? That’s pure conduit fiber, and whether in Japan or Korea or Utah it comes to around 2.5 megabits per second per dollar per month.
By making cents out of bits, Paul Morris hit home with the answer and provided more evidence against those attempting to “fix” the last mile with digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable. Compared to a fiber future, the current wireline plant suffers from capped capacity, limited reliability, and large lifetime costs.
Like frogs happily swimming in a copper kettle as the heat is slowly applied to the copper coil, DSL-dominated systems face a bleak future as customers whet their appetites for more and more bandwidth at lower and lower prices. Raw bandwidth unleashes a spiral of creativity at the edge that brings new apps driving yet more bandwidth. Users will tire of watching video clips the size of postcards on their PCs, calling on UPS to deliver their family videos, and waiting several hours to download the latest movie release onto their Seagate (STX) Barracuda Terabyte drives.
They may also begin to wonder why they no longer bump into their neighbors at Blockbuster (BBI). Could it have anything to do with the Verizon vans recently seen outside their homes?
Trends in Japan are on Verizon’s side… But we’re a runaway leader over Verizon in broadband, cries AT&T. Using DSL, we can pass 18 million homes by 2008.
Whoa! Even ignoring the more important capacity constraints, that’s not too far ahead of Verizon, which plans to pass 6 million homes with fiber by the end of this year. At its current rate of deployment, Verizon will have passed a total of 12 million by 2008, and the company has hinted that it may soon begin to deploy more quickly. Compared to Verizon, even UTOPIA with its 160 thousand customers is a gated community.
