Lucent Technologies auf Expansionskurs...

Lucent übernimmt Netzausrüster Agere für 415 Mio. USD in Aktien

ALLENTOWN, PA (dpa-AFX) - Lucent Technologies Inc LU.NYS hat die Übernahme des nichtbörsennotierten Netzwerkausrüsters Agere angekündigt. Wie Lucent am Donnerstag mitteilte, erfolgt die Übernahme durch einen Aktientausch. Agere erhalte 8 Mio. Lucent-Aktien, woraus sich zum gestrigen Schlusskurs ein Kaufpreis von 415 Mio. USD ergibt.

Lucent rechnet mit einem Abschluss der Übernahme im zweiten Quartal des laufenden Jahres. In diesen Zeitraum soll auch eine außerordentliche Belastung durch die Übernahmen verbucht werden.

Durch die Übernahme steigt Lucent in den schnellwachsenden Markt programmierbarer Logikbausteine für paketbasierte Netzwerke, wie beispielsweise dem Internet, ein. Diese Hochgeschwindigkeitschips ermöglichen den Herstellern von Netzwerk-Ausrüstung ihre Switches und Router mit neuen Ausstattungsmerkmalen zu versehen, ohne die Kosten nach oben zu treiben./cs/fs




Quelle: dpa - AFX -Alle Angaben ohne Gewähr-


Analyst Sven Browers vom Bankhaus Hermann Lampe stufte die Aktie der Lucent Technologies mit Kaufen ein.

gis/ap - © GIS Wirtschaftsdaten GmbH  


Analyst Charles A. Disanza von Gerard Klauer Mattison stufte die Aktie der Lucent Technologies von Halten auf Kaufen hoch, 12-Monats-Kursziel: 78 US-Dollar.

gis/ap - © GIS Wirtschaftsdaten GmbH  



 

Lucent bringt TÄGLICH 3 neue Patente auf den Markt,
und alle Paar Jahre einen Nobelpreisträger!
*
Ich habe Lucent mal testweise ins Depot gelegt (52,50),
zu einem buy derzeit kann ich mich nicht durchringen,
aber ich halte es für unwahrscheinlich, daß Lucent
unter 50,00 rutscht - bei normalem Marktumfeld.
*
Und was ist mit deinem Lucent-Call ? 838553 war es glaube ich?
Bist du jetzt wieder dabei für 0,20?

Gruß an alle
IZ

 

Lucent To Buy Programmable Network Processor Tech Co.
Thursday, January 20, 2000 11:32 AM

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (Dow Jones)--Lucent Technologies Inc.'s (LU, news, msgs) communications semiconductor unit, Microelectronics Group, agreed to acquire Agere, a programmable network processor technology provider, for about 8 million common shares of Lucent.

Based on Lucent's closing share price on Wednesday, the transaction is worth about $415 million.

In a press release Thursday, Lucent said Agere's programmable processing chips allow manufacturers to move packets 25 times faster than current programmable processor technology.

Lucent, which expects to complete the acquisition in the third quarter ending June 30, said it expects to report a third quarter charge to write off in-process research and development.

A First Call/Thomson Financial survey of 29 analysts produced a mean earnings estimate of 36 cents a diluted share for the third quarter.

Excluding the charge, Lucent expects the purchase to be essentially neutral to its earnings in fiscal 2000.

As part of the acquisition, Agere's staff of about 90 will join Lucent's Networks and Communications unit.

Agere will continue to be based in its Austin, Texas, headquarters. Agere Chief Executive Ford Tamer will become general manager for the unit's network processor group.

-In Kyung Kim; Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5400

aus Quicken.com entliehen.
Das Rating heißt bei Quicken.com übrigens Strong By.
Ich habe jetzt aúch ein paar gekauft.
:-)
Turbo  

Lucent ist übrigens auch die einzige Firma, die bereits seit einigen Monaten im Bereich WirelessLAN 10 Mb/s (sic!) (IEEE 802.11) liefern kann!

Alle anderen Hersteller (auch ELSA) basteln noch an der bereits veralteten Vorgängerversion mit nur 1 MB/s herum! (nach eigenem Bekunden will ELSA in seinen Produkten eine Upgrademöglichkeit vorsehen, z.Zt. existieren aber nur Prototypen).

Auch in anderen Technologiefeldern hat Lucent ausgezeichnete neue Produkte, die allerdings nicht ganz so publikumswirksam sind (PABXe, GSM-Infrastruktur, Router, alles auch im LWL-Bereich, Schwerpunkt immer noch voice, aber durch Koops auch voice/data integration products etc...)
Lucent hat ausgezeichnete Forschungsabteilungen (bell-labs etc) und Kontakte zu den High-Tech-Universitäten in USA.

Lucent ist zu diesen Kursen strong buy auch wenn die Company (derzeit) noch keine Dynamik wie z.B. Cisco oder Norcom hat, aber darin liegt derzeit auch ein Gewinnpotential von 70-100% auf Jahressicht. Risiko m.E. max. 8%

Gruss,
Schtonk  

 

 

hast du noch aktuellere info?  

 

 

sollte sich 751462 ansehen. Habe mir den vor ein paar Tagen ins Depot gelegt.
Viele Grüße
Guru Brauni  

ntgegen dem nasdaq trend von gestern nacht!  

für den starken Kursrückgang ??

Thanks gtx  

erwischte. das jedoch damit die kursgewinne des letzten jahres fast ausgeloescht wurden ist imho uebertrieben. ich denke dass die aktie sich um ein drittel auf 62-65 in den naechsten 2-5 monaten erholt. neue technologien sind schon im gespraech (siehe anderen thread). un dlucent zaehlt nachwie vor zu den top infrasturcture providern.  

Denn mit der langen Laufzeit gehe ich auf Nummer sicher.

Viele Grüße
Guru Brauni  

lucent in einem atemzug mit siemens erwaehnt. mehr brauche ich ja wohl nicht zusagen. ansonsten spricht die technik fuer sich selbst....


InterWAVE rides IPO momentum, climbs more than 100 pct

NEW YORK, Jan 28 (Reuters) - InterWAVE Communications International Ltd. , which makes
compact wireless systems for voice and data communications, climbed more than 100 percent as it joined other
initial public offerings hitting Wall Street on Friday.

Shares of the Berumda-based company were last up 16 at 29 on the Nasdaq after its $13 a share IPO raised
$110.5 million through lead underwriter Salomon Smith Barney.

The deal represented a 19 percent stake in the company. It had initially planned on offering 7.5 million shares in a
range of $8-10.

"The wireless communications industry is hot, others have done extremely well," said John Fitzgibbon of
Redherring.com. "The company seems to be pretty solid. There is a lot of demand for the stock."

InterWAVE has an alliance with Nortel Networks Corp. , who is a principal shareholders. Hutchinson
Whampoa Ltd. <0013.HK> is also a shareholder.

Competitors include Ericsson , Lucent Technologies Inc. and Siemens
.

The company's system, or "network in a box," is positioned as an option to traditional telephone networks for
companies with multiple locations and it is also effective for reaching employees "in the field," according to Irv
DeGraw, research director at WorldFinanceNet.com. According to International Data Corporation, the
worldwide wireless market is expected to grow from 303 million users in 1998 to approximately 1.1 billion by
2003. ((--Reshma Kapadia, Wall Street Desk (212) 859-1730))

REUTERS

Rtr 13:44 01-28-00  

lucent in einem atemzug mit siemens erwaehnt. mehr brauche ich ja wohl nicht zusagen. ansonsten spricht die technik fuer sich selbst....


InterWAVE rides IPO momentum, climbs more than 100 pct

NEW YORK, Jan 28 (Reuters) - InterWAVE Communications International Ltd. , which makes
compact wireless systems for voice and data communications, climbed more than 100 percent as it joined other
initial public offerings hitting Wall Street on Friday.

Shares of the Berumda-based company were last up 16 at 29 on the Nasdaq after its $13 a share IPO raised
$110.5 million through lead underwriter Salomon Smith Barney.

The deal represented a 19 percent stake in the company. It had initially planned on offering 7.5 million shares in a
range of $8-10.

"The wireless communications industry is hot, others have done extremely well," said John Fitzgibbon of
Redherring.com. "The company seems to be pretty solid. There is a lot of demand for the stock."

InterWAVE has an alliance with Nortel Networks Corp. , who is a principal shareholders. Hutchinson
Whampoa Ltd. <0013.HK> is also a shareholder.

Competitors include Ericsson , Lucent Technologies Inc. and Siemens
.

The company's system, or "network in a box," is positioned as an option to traditional telephone networks for
companies with multiple locations and it is also effective for reaching employees "in the field," according to Irv
DeGraw, research director at WorldFinanceNet.com. According to International Data Corporation, the
worldwide wireless market is expected to grow from 303 million users in 1998 to approximately 1.1 billion by
2003. ((--Reshma Kapadia, Wall Street Desk (212) 859-1730))

REUTERS

Rtr 13:44 01-28-00  

lucent in einem atemzug mit siemens erwaehnt. mehr brauche ich ja wohl nicht zusagen. ansonsten spricht die technik fuer sich selbst....


InterWAVE rides IPO momentum, climbs more than 100 pct

NEW YORK, Jan 28 (Reuters) - InterWAVE Communications International Ltd. , which makes
compact wireless systems for voice and data communications, climbed more than 100 percent as it joined other
initial public offerings hitting Wall Street on Friday.

Shares of the Berumda-based company were last up 16 at 29 on the Nasdaq after its $13 a share IPO raised
$110.5 million through lead underwriter Salomon Smith Barney.

The deal represented a 19 percent stake in the company. It had initially planned on offering 7.5 million shares in a
range of $8-10.

"The wireless communications industry is hot, others have done extremely well," said John Fitzgibbon of
Redherring.com. "The company seems to be pretty solid. There is a lot of demand for the stock."

InterWAVE has an alliance with Nortel Networks Corp. , who is a principal shareholders. Hutchinson
Whampoa Ltd. <0013.HK> is also a shareholder.

Competitors include Ericsson , Lucent Technologies Inc. and Siemens
.

The company's system, or "network in a box," is positioned as an option to traditional telephone networks for
companies with multiple locations and it is also effective for reaching employees "in the field," according to Irv
DeGraw, research director at WorldFinanceNet.com. According to International Data Corporation, the
worldwide wireless market is expected to grow from 303 million users in 1998 to approximately 1.1 billion by
2003. ((--Reshma Kapadia, Wall Street Desk (212) 859-1730))

REUTERS

Rtr 13:44 01-28-00  

lucent mit siemens auf einer stufe und die technik wird sich beweisen..


InterWAVE rides IPO momentum, climbs more than 100 pct

NEW YORK, Jan 28 (Reuters) - InterWAVE Communications International Ltd. , which makes
compact wireless systems for voice and data communications, climbed more than 100 percent as it joined other
initial public offerings hitting Wall Street on Friday.

Shares of the Berumda-based company were last up 16 at 29 on the Nasdaq after its $13 a share IPO raised
$110.5 million through lead underwriter Salomon Smith Barney.

The deal represented a 19 percent stake in the company. It had initially planned on offering 7.5 million shares in a
range of $8-10.

"The wireless communications industry is hot, others have done extremely well," said John Fitzgibbon of
Redherring.com. "The company seems to be pretty solid. There is a lot of demand for the stock."

InterWAVE has an alliance with Nortel Networks Corp. , who is a principal shareholders. Hutchinson
Whampoa Ltd. <0013.HK> is also a shareholder.

Competitors include Ericsson , Lucent Technologies Inc. and Siemens
.

The company's system, or "network in a box," is positioned as an option to traditional telephone networks for
companies with multiple locations and it is also effective for reaching employees "in the field," according to Irv
DeGraw, research director at WorldFinanceNet.com. According to International Data Corporation, the
worldwide wireless market is expected to grow from 303 million users in 1998 to approximately 1.1 billion by
2003. ((--Reshma Kapadia, Wall Street Desk (212) 859-1730))

REUTERS

Rtr 13:44 01-28-00  

Lucent Mulls Tracking Stocks, Divestitures

By Jessica Hall

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Telecommunications equipment maker Lucent Technologies Inc. may create
tracking stocks for its optical networking or microelectronics units and divest some slow-growing operations,
sources familiar with the situation said.

Tracking stocks would let Lucent (NYSE:LU - news), the world's largest telecommunications equipment
maker, highlight the strength of these fast-growing businesses, particularly capitalizing on the recent fervor for
optical networking stocks.

No decision has been made on the creation of one or more tracking stocks. An announcement could be
made this quarter, sources said.

``It's fair to say that they are thinking about it,'' said one source, who declined to be identified by name.

A Lucent spokeswoman said the company does not comment on rumor or speculation. Shares of Lucent
traded at 55-3/8, up 2-11/16 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The trackers also would allow investors to monitor the growth of the fast-growing units more closely than if
they were kept within the larger company and muddied by the growth of some older businesses.

Tracking stocks have become a popular way for companies to highlight a fast-growing unit and increase
shareholder value. Lucent's former parent, AT&T Corp. (NYSE:T - news), is launching a tracking stock for
its booming wireless telephone unit.

Lucent, which last week said first quarter profits fell 23 percent as revenues remained flat, is under pressure
to regain investor confidence and restore growth, analysts said.

Lucent has been pitted against chief rivals Cisco Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:CSCO - news) and Nortel
Networks Corp. (NYSE:NT - news) (Toronto:NT.TO - news) in a fierce battle to supply telephone
companies, Internet service providers and large corporations with sophisticated equipment that can transmit
increasingly large volumes of data and voice traffic.

An optical tracking stock may be well-received by the stock market and the unit could be valued as high as
$70 billion, analysts said.

Shares of optical networking firms such as JDS Uniphase Corp. (NasdaqNM:JDSU - news) and SDL Inc.
(NasdaqNM:SDLI - news) have soared in recent months amid red-hot demand for fiber optic
communications equipment.

Last fall, Lucent reorganized into four core units to better focus on the fastest-growing industry segments,
such as semiconductors, wireless, optical and data networking, and professional services.

Lucent recently has moved to expand its microelectronics unit, which makes sophisticated semiconductors for
communications networks and products.

Lucent recently agreed to acquire privately-held Agere for about $415 million in stock to move into the
market for programmable semiconductors for data networks.

The company is expected to further fine-tune its sales channels to increase revenues by making purchases and
service easier for customers.

In addition to mulling tracking stocks, Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent is also looking to exit certain
slow-growing businesses, sources said.

The company recently shed its consumer telephone manufacturing assets to VTech Holdings Ltd. (0303.HK)
and the divestiture of other non-core businesses will likely follow, sources said.

Divesting Systimax, which makes cabling systems for corporate campuses, would be an obvious move,
analysts said. Systimax's declining sales has dampened Lucent's results for months and weighed on the
performance of its so-called enterprise unit, which sells equipment to large businesses and government
agencies.

Lucent also is trying to sell its U.S.-based sales group that markets communications services to small
businesses.

Last year, Lucent had agreed to sell the business to a group led by industry executive Susan Mandl but the
pact was later terminated. Lucent said in November it was in talks to sell the unit to a new buyer and sources
said an announcement is expected shortly.  

LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES' charmed youth is over. In the four years
                              since it was spun off from AT&T, it has never known adversity--until
                              now. Lucent posted 15 straight quarters of upside surprises after
                              going public in 1996. Its revenue swelled 75% in that time. By
                              year-end 1999 Lucent's stock price was up elevenfold, and it had
                              surpassed AT&Tto become America's most widely held stock, with
                              4.6 million shareholders.

                              Now the firm that never missed the bull's-eye looks more like the
                              gang that can't shoot straight. Chief Executive Richard McGinn
                              sprang a nasty surprise last month: In the December quarter net fell
                              30% below Wall Street expectations and 20% below a year ago. In
                              one day the stock lost 28%, or $64 billion, of its value. A week later
                              the stock fell again on rumors that Lucent is under investigation for
                              bogus accounting; the company denies it.

                              Scarier still are the reasons for the December shortfall. Lucent
                              botched a shift in demand to cutting-edge gear for fiber optics, failing
                              to recognize telecom companies' hunger for bandwidth and then
                              reacting too slowly to stop them from defecting to archrival Nortel
                              Networks. McGinn's bombshell left some investors fretting: Had
                              Lucent grown so fast that it was out of control? Had it so front-loaded
                              orders that even bigger disappointments loom?

                              It simply won't matter. Lucent is well poised to help lead an optical
                              revolution that will whip information around the globe at a fraction of
                              today's cost. This infobahn will be powered by photons rather than
                              electrons. Its vehicles will be digital packets that haul voice, data and
                              video with equal ease. The traffic signals will be a higher form of
                              today's Internet Protocol, or IP.

                              Digital deals like America Online's $165 billion bid for Time Warner
                              will only stoke demand for more Lucent gear. "There is still no better
                              time to be in the business," McGinn says.

                              For 25 years high costs had confined fiber optics to handling
                              long-haul tasks. Now the near-infinite capacity of these glass tendrils
                              is spreading from long-distance networks to local nets and, one day,
                              to corporate desktops and your living room. It will eliminate bandwidth
                              bottlenecks and deliver unlimited connectivity. Movies and files of
                              almost any size will be as accessible as voice calls and e-mail are
                              today. You could check your stocks and watch a digital-TV thriller on
                              one screen, while your daughter videoconferences with her
                              grandparents on another.

                              Lucent already surfs this optical wave--so much so that it is mulling
                              whether to issue a new tracking stock pegged to its booming optics
                              business. While Wall Street body-slammed the company for one
                              lackluster quarter, in that same period sales of Lucent's most
                              advanced optical gear doubled, and its data network business grew
                              60%. Lucent owns the U.S. market for wireless equipment, and its
                              worldwide wireless sales should rise 25% this year.

                              All told, McGinn sees 17% revenue growth and continued gains in
                              market share--this, for an outfit with $38 billion in sales last year. "As
                              the world moves to global networks, we aim to be the plumbers, with
                              our optics, silicon, software and services," McGinn says.

                              The ranks are as excited as he is. The payroll includes scores of
                              multimillionaires, thanks to Lucent stock. Two employees are
                              billionaires and two more are worth several hundred million dollars
                              apiece because they sold their companies to Lucent. Yet they stick
                              around, too (see box, p. 94). What drives them to punch the company
                              clock?

                              "It's about restlessness," says McGinn, shoeless and tapping his feet
                              nervously and nonstop through a two-hour interview. "A corporation is
                              the sum of the restlessness of its people."

                              Yet for all its success, Lucent lacks Internet sex appeal. Cisco
                              makes Internet routers and is just one-third the size of Lucent in
                              sales. But Cisco's market value is more than double Lucent's. Its
                              price-earnings multiple is 128, three times Lucent's. The optical wave
                              could give Lucent a shot at some Cisco sizzle.

                              For now, Wall Street believes in Cisco chief John Chambers, the Billy
                              Graham of Internet Protocol, who proselytizes that the entire telecom
                              world will make a fast conversion to IP, abandoning the "circuit
                              switch" networks in which Lucent reigns.

                              Nonsense, McGinn says: "The truth is that IP is not ready for prime
                              time." He adds: "We have avoided Elmer Gantry excesses and made
                              a conscious effort not to create an image that is greater than the
                              substance." He calls Cisco "the bestselling machine since IBM of the
                              1970s."

                              ---------

                              Lucent already surfs the optical wave--so much so that it may issue a
                              tracking stock pegged to its optical business.

                              ---------


                              McGinn is very much the regular guy. A trim, bookish history grad in
                              a company of engineers, he drives his 10-year-old daughter to school
                              before work. He is intense, but so unassuming that he flashes his
                              Lucent ID to security when he shows up each morning. McGinn has
                              long enjoyed competing in Iron Man events, though now that he's 53,
                              he jokes he is more of a tin man.

                              He joined the old AT&T's Illinois Bell as a salesman in 1969 and
                              worked his way up. By 1993 he was running the Network Systems
                              group, which would form the core of Lucent. AT&T split into three
                              companies in 1996, cleaving off Lucent because it was losing sales
                              from carriers wary of buying from rival AT&T. McGinn seemed a
                              shoo-in for the top job, but the AT&Tboard tapped a grayhead revered
                              on Wall Street, former Cummins Engine chief Henry Schacht.

                              Rich McGinn settled for second fiddle--and set out to orchestrate the
                              company he one day would run. Lucent (a synonym for luminous)
                              started life in April 1996 as one of the top 50 U.S. companies in
                              sales, with a market value of $19 billion (now at $170 billion, even
                              after the recent stock plunge).

                              In truth, Lucent is not four years old; it began 128 years ago as
                              Western Electric--the guys who made phones in nothing but black for
                              half a century. It evolved into a mishmash of businesses--network
                              boxes for carriers, PBXs for offices, phones, semiconductors and Bell
                              Labs. The units had little in common but a reputation: "Great
                              technology, too late."

                              Early on, Schacht and McGinn gathered their top executives to tell
                              them the performance bar was going way up: Sales must rise at
                              double the old rate, and the earnings growth rate must triple. "Rich
                              was even-toned but totally lacking in ambiguity about what he
                              expected," says Patricia Russo, who runs the carrier-equipment
                              business.

                              They tied pay and budgets to performance, even for scientists in the
                              ivory tower. The duo granted 100 options to each of the 131,000
                              employees, down to the humblest factory worker in Bangkok. The
                              option package's value is up to $18,000.

                              Untethered from AT&T, Lucent quickly won billion-dollar orders that
                              had eluded it. By October 1997 McGinn's patience paid off: Henry
                              Schacht retired.

                              McGinn went on a shopping spree. He has spent $32 billion in stock
                              and cash on 30 acquisitions. The largest: $20 billion for Ascend
                              Communications, the top maker of ATM switches, which phone
                              carriers use to link old voice circuits and new data pipelines.

                              He also focused inward, selling off dull but profitable businesses such
                              as circuit boards. McGinn had the semiconductor group dump
                              commodity chips in favor of digital signal processors. Deeply in the
                              red under AT&T, the chip unit grew 18% last year to $3.6 billion. The
                              gross profit margin hit 48%.

                              Lucent is also one of the world's largest builders of wireless phone
                              systems, with nearly half the U.S. market. It leads in making the
                              chips in communications gear, supplying rivals Cisco and Nortel.
                              Overseas, where half the population has yet to use a telephone,
                              Lucent's sales grew 47% last year to $12.2 billion. China Unicom
                              recently gave Lucent a billion-dollar contract to design and deploy an
                              entire network, from the optical backbone to the circuits and wireless
                              systems that will feed into it. Few rivals can handle such a job.

                              The optics frenzy will drive new growth. Lucent runs neck and neck
                              with Nortel as the top supplier of optical gear. True, the real growth in
                              networking is in the data world, where Cisco thrives, not in voice
                              communications. And most of Lucent revenues still involve voice. But
                              optics will drive both voice and data. Worldwide, phone companies
                              still earn 90% of revenue from voice traffic. Established carriers won't
                              suddenly junk trillions of dollars' worth of circuit-based equipment,
                              even if they could afford to do so.

                              And the truth is that IP networks fall far short of the "five nines," the
                              99.999% reliability that carriers demand. Plain old telephone service
                              also is deceptively complex. After decades of development, a
                              standard phone gives users access to 2,500 services, from 911
                              service to call forwarding. It will take years to develop IP software that
                              matches up. That is why, in four years, as little as 10% of phone
                              systems may be IP-based, Gartner Group says.

                              Lucent, Cisco and Nortel all keenly focus on the coming shift to
                              IP-over-optical networking, but they hold divergent views on when and
                              in what form it will arrive. The physics and economics are too
                              compelling to sit this one out. Today's long-haul optics use photons,
                              or light, to carry information at about 1% of what it would cost with
                              electronic circuits and semiconductors.


                              ---------

                              McGinn likens Lucent to a teenager who gets good grades but
                              sometimes backs into a pole and cracks a taillight.

                              ---------

                              But beaming long-haul optical signals used to demand old,
                              electron-based technology at way-stops. There, packets of photons
                              are translated into electronic form, magnified, shuffled and redirected,
                              and then converted back to photons for another long trip. The
                              conversions entail racks of gear, with some installations the size of a
                              bus and costing millions. It is why optics has been used mostly to
                              zap data between cities and under oceans.

                              Until now. Lucent is out front in developing new tools that skip most
                              of the electronic steps and will thereby make fiber economical in ever
                              more local uses. Someday we'll all have "fiber to the forehead," says
                              Gerald Butters, head of technology strategy. Lucent's 30,000 techies
                              work on such advances as plastic fiber flexible enough to wire your
                              home, a new over-the-air laser system for local optical transmission
                              and routers with mind-boggling capacity.

                              Today, optical fibers can transport 10 billion bits of data per second
                              on a single wavelength. In order to explain just how much that is, let's
                              pause to coin a word for the cumbersome phrase "bits per second":
                              Let's say, "bips."

                              So, the fiber pumps out 10 "gigabips" on a wavelength. That's enough
                              to handle 125,000 voice calls. Each strand of fiber, in turn, can carry
                              80 wavelengths and typically uses 40, or 400 gigabips in all. That's
                              enough for 5 million calls and represents a staggering fivefold gain
                              over just a year ago.

                              The numbers don't stop there. The typical fiber-optic cable now holds
                              144 strands of glass, enough to accommodate 57.6 terabips. This
                              bandwidth could handle 720 million simultaneous calls. The world
                              does not, of course, need that many people chattering at once, but it
                              may need millions at once fetching different video Web pages, and
                              video consumes a lot more bandwidth than phone calls.

                              Someday, optics may be so cheap and omnipresent that any home
                              can have its own 45-megabips pipeline, enough bandwidth to run the
                              entire server network of the Washington Post. "It's about driving
                              monster capacity," says Wayne Knox, head of advanced photonics
                              research at Bell Labs.

                              Lucent sold $6 billion in optical equipment and fiber last year--six
                              times the sales Cisco will probably make in optics this year, though
                              Cisco has spent $9.5 billion in recent months buying optical firms.
                              Lucent makes and installs fiber cables, makes the lasers that send
                              out bursts of photons and writes the code that manages the
                              networks.

                              Plenty of optical products are in the pipeline. Butters, the tech
                              strategist, is known inside Lucent for "Butters' Law." To wit: As the
                              number of different-colored light waves on a strand of fiber and the
                              amount of data being transported at each wavelength expand, fiber's
                              capacity will double every nine months--twice as fast as chips
                              advance.

                              Early last year, BellLabs worked on a way to switch light beams
                              around a long-distance network without having to translate them into
                              and back from electron-based forms. Many pizzas and sleeping-bag
                              parties later, Bell Labs unveiled the LambdaRouter in November. The
                              elegant box uses chips, micromachines and 256 tiny mirrors to
                              bounce light waves toward their destinations at up to 10 terabips--10
                              times the traffic that runs over the entire Internet today. Lucent says
                              the new router could cut switching costs by up to 60%; Global
                              Crossing plans to test it.

                              Another product, due this summer, is OpticAir. It sends laser light
                              through the sky at 10 gigabips. That will let corporate customers
                              endow their employees with rich Web access, without a costly fiber
                              build out.

                              Lucent also leads in voice-over-IP systems. Two years ago
                              telecommer Level 3 challenged Lucent and rivals to create software
                              that could carry phone calls over its IP data network. Four months
                              later Bell Labs unveiled Softswitch. "They blew us away," says Level
                              3 Chief Operating Officer Kevin O'Hara. Lucent hopes carriers and
                              software developers will use Softswitch as a Windows-like platform to
                              create features like call forwarding.

                              But Lucent dropped the ball with one key optical product: a hot
                              10-gigabips switch that uploads data to long-distance optical
                              networks. Underestimating demand, McGinn and Butters were slow
                              to roll it out. Nortel grabbed 85% of a booming market. "As a
                              technologist, this place is heaven, but we'll only dominate optical
                              networking if we execute better and stop being our own worst
                              enemy," says Jeong Kim, who helps run Lucent's optics group.

                              As the tectonic shift to ubiquitous optical networks takes hold, all the
                              big players may keep buying new properties to push further into the
                              field. Cisco, thinnest in optics, could pursue Corvis, a maker of
                              long-distance optical systems, or Optical Networks or Tellium; it
                              holds small stakes in all three.

                              McGinn admits he is on the hunt in Lucent's highest-growth
                              businesses--optics, chips, software and networking. More interesting
                              still may be the prospects for Lucent spinoffs or tracking stocks,
                              particularly in optics. One optical rival, JDS Uniphase, a maker of
                              opto-electronic devices, commands a market value of $70 billion on
                              sales of just $283 million last year. At Lucent, a similar business had
                              about the same level of sales; a tracking stock could unlock tens of
                              billions in value.

                              No technological revolution gets under way without some pain,
                              without glitches. "This is not a well-oiled machine," McGinn says. He
                              likens Lucent more to a teenage driver who pulls down good grades
                              but "from time to time backs into a pole and cracks a taillight. That's
                              because we are immature." A telling description of a century-old
                              company.
                              --------------------------------------------------

                              FORBES - February 7, 2000

                              www.forbes.com