Did SBC Get It Wrong?
Eric Kainerand Anton Wahlman are a couple of smart guys at Needham & Company. Their Equity Research Note (August 31, 2005) about Sigma Designs, Inc. (SIGM/OTC) caught my eye. In fact it triggered my screed below (Gigabit Ethernet to Your Living Room).
[tease]
Regarding SBC, we believe Project Lightspeed will remain disappointing throughout at least 2006, considering the low bandwidth available in SBC’s DSL network. We believe that 100 Mb/s - 200 Mb/s per household is the minimum SBC needs to compete successfully in a switched network, not the current plans of 20 Mb/s or even 50 Mb/s. We believe SBC may be important training for Microsoft to work out system bugs, but in order for the service to become successful enough to take very significant market share against cable and satellite, we believe the system needs to be capable of transmitting double-digit HDTV streams to each household. Basically, we believe each attractive household customer will require several multi-tuner HDTV DVRs in order to be competitive.
[via Needham (PDF)]
[contact info]
ekainer@needhamco.com
awahlman@needhamco.com