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DESPITE WALL STREET, OPTICAL STAYS HOT ...

Investors have temporarily soured on optical companies, but lighting up the nation's network continues unabated. Telseon, Denver, is extending its optical networking services in Chicago, Dallas, Miami and St. Louis, using the transport exchange facilities and services of LayerOne Inc., Dallas.... Optical bandwidth-on-demand provider-Yipes Communications, San Francisco, reports two new deals, Communications and Power Industries and PDI/DreamWorks, both of Palo Alto, CA.... SAVVIS Communications, Herndon,VA, is partnering with Nortel Networks, Palo Alto, CA, and Level 3 Communications, Broomfield, CO, to build a 20,000-mile redundant backbone network comprised of eight rings connecting 50 U.S. markets.... Sphere Optical Networks, New York, is expanding its metropolitan gateway network into 14 U.S. and European cities.... Agilent Technologies', Palo Alto, CA, new division focuses on the high-speed optical networking market.

ON THE RESEARCH FRONT ...

Demand for wireless data and Internet services is growing rapidly, according to a report from Cahners In-Stat Group, Scottsdale, AZ. The hottest growth segment will be mobile phone Internet access.... According to the Gartner Group, mobile phone users in China have surpassed Japan, 51.7 million to 51.1 million, respectively. Clarent Corp., Redwood City, CA, is riding that trend with two new deals in China. China Mobile will use Clarent's voice-over-IP platform to build its nextgen backbone network, and the company also is partnering with China BOC to implement more advanced, cost-effective IP telephony solutions in the world's largest market.... Larger telecom equipment suppliers--Avaya, Williams Communications, Siemens, GTE, and Norstan--are at an advantage over their smaller, regional and local rivals, according to The Phillips Group-InfoTech. National companies have become difficult to compete with on price points for maintenance contracts and offer more advanced capabilities than local competitors.... Phillips InfoTech also predicts use of unified messaging solutions by large enterprises will increase dramatically within three years, with the global market reaching $6.8 billion by 2004.

ASPS FOR ASPS ...

Attention (at least on Wall Street) is shifting from the application service provider model to application infrastructure providers (AIPs). Venture capitalists are interested in AIPs over the riskier ASPs. AIPs provide hosting services tailored to the application hosting needs of ASPs and enterprises.... Ernst & Young spinoff, EYT, Chantilly, VA, has agreed to host its financial ASP offering at Equinix, Mountain View, CA, Internet business exchange centers in Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley.... Baltimore Technologies, Boston, now an ASP, offers e-security solutions for other ASPS, including secure PKI hosting, VPN, secure Web access and content filtering.