WorldCom Bids On Various Rhythms Assets

iamabot writes: "DSL providers are cheap these days. After the AT&T acquisition of NorthPoint assets for 135 million, WorldCom has issued a 40 million dollar bid for various assets of Rhythms. The interesting thing here is after some other providers disconnected their subscribers, WorldCom seem to be interested in operating the existing network. I suspect this will actually be a fairly cheap endeavor, when compared to the capital and recurring expenditures DSL providers faced over the past few years, especially for WorldCom. The majority of the cost associated with lighting up a DSL network nationally involves the capital expenditures to buy the equipment and the huge recurring monthly transport costs for central office aggregation to a node. Does anyone else see the acquisitions in the past year or so as an opportunity for the DSL industry to rebound?"

I don't think so...

[SnicklesTheElf]

After so many bounced and now that most of what's left are hurting...it's unlikely to see them gain alot of financial backing.

Stopping the SPAM

[Chris Deckard]

I'm just trying to get Verizon to stop sending me things in the mail or calling me about it. I cancelled service and switched to cable. If I ever want DSL again, I'll call them. Until then they can stop wasting trees.

-Chris

Re:Clarification.

[Shishak]

It means it cost a lot of money to build the BIG ATM backbone to carry all the DSL traffic from the DLSAMs to the POP.

Most DSL providers have one POP in a region and the backhaul all the DSL traffic from the DSLAMS colo'ed in the telco central office to that POP over the telco's ATM network. The Telco loves to build SONET rings over already existing fiber because it doesn't cost them anything 'cept the cards in the OC-192 mux.

Most DSL providers start with DS-3 (45mbps) ATM SONET rings in a LATA. You need a lot of DSL subscribers to pay for that ring every month and only a 1/10th of that to fill it. Moving up in speed to OC-3,OC-12,OC-48,OC-192 gets very expensive.

Capital expenditures

[zardor]

For those who are interested in the capital (equipment) cost of rolling out a DSL service, the current basic cost is down to about $50 for a USB modem, and $100 for the DSLAM port. (assuming you want 10,000 of them).
Of course, you have to add in the warm bodies in the call center, and the backbone bandwidth, but these are telcos, and are supposed(!) to have a good ATM backbone already. (Besides, moving surfers from dial-up to DSL saves a *HUGE* volume of voice capacity on the backbone anyhow).
Source for the above figures is the latest [dslprime.com] news report from DSL Prime [dslprime.com].
They provide a good free (as in beer) report on the DSL industry.