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?"

Comments

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 news report from DSL Prime.
They provide a good free (as in beer) report on the DSL industry.