Ascend to Offer New Link to Internet
Alameda, Calif. — Ascend Communications Inc. will unveil Monday a new lower-priced remote-access product, broadening its market-leading range of products for linking people onto the Internet.
The Max 4048 will sell primarily to smaller Internet service providers and help Ascend broaden its customer base from its traditional strength with the larger Internet service providers that cater to business customers.
The Max 4048 will sell for $26,000, a 15% price reduction from Ascend’s previous comparable product. The price cut is partly a response to Cisco Systems Inc., said Robert MacLellan, an analyst at Dillon, Read.
“Cisco has been cutting prices pretty aggressively on remote access products,” he said.
Ascend is the market leader in remote access products, and the new Max 4048 will help it build on its lead, MacLellan said.
“On prices and on technology, nobody, including Cisco, can touch Ascend,” MacLellan said.
A recent report from International Data Corp. showed that Ascend increased its No. 1 position in the remote-access market by 1 percentage point to a 29% market share, from the first to the second half of 1996.
Cisco Systems Inc. jumped to a 14 percent share in the second half of last year, from 11% in the first half. U.S. Robotics Corp. increased its market share to 28% in the second half of 1996, just 1 percentage point behind Ascend, according to the IDC figures.
Kurt Bauer, Ascend vice president for core product management, said the Max 4048 would enable it to reach the smaller, so-called mom-and-pop Internet service providers, which previously found Ascend’s products too expensive.
“They can install the Max 4048 quickly and cheaply and then when their customer base and their infrastructure grows, move onto our bigger products,” Bauer said.
Separately, Bauer said that America Online Inc.’s decision to experiment with Ascend 56 kilobit-per-second remote access products was an important victory at a company that has traditionally been a customer of U.S. Robotics.
AOL will try out the Ascend equipment in 250 cities, Bauer said. “That’s five times as many points of presence as they’re trialing with U.S. Robotics.”
In each city where it receives phone calls, or each so-called point of presence, the online service provider needs at least one remote-access server.
AOL, the largest online service provider in the world with 8 million U.S. customers, has already said it’s trying out U.S. Robotics’ 56k remote access equipment.
U.S. Robotics’ X2 56k technology is incompatible with K56Flex technology used by Ascend. To ensure that Web surfers can connect at the higher speeds, service providers need to offer both X2 and K56Flex connections.
