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We make mistakes, and welcome your corrections. We had written this before the criticism at top came in, and it's even more to the point. Journalists and analysts are rarely challenged to go back to their mistakes, so we wanted to look back at last year's projections. We were wrong believing voice over DSL would be ubiquitous later this year, and it looks like the yearend US subscribers will be about 2.3M, because the bells couldn't deliver fast enough to keep up with demand. It will be even less if SBC doesn't get their act together; Dan Reingold of CSFB has lowered his projection for SBC yearend to 900,000, pointing out even that rate will take 5,000 installs a day in Q4. We also clearly were wrong when we predicted that operations problems would be solved by the Bells this year. But we are very proud we wrote in December "smart leaders are ready in case the market tanks, and are accumulating cash" - the NorthPoint sale to Verizon was virtually forced by the absence of a cash cushion. Building large cash reserves would protect richly priced companies like Globespan, Virata, Aware, Copper Mountain or Efficient from the catastrophe the unpredictable day when a top analyst turns against them and drives the market, or a disappointing quarter takes the magic away. We just saw Netopia drop 26% in one day, because an analyst remarks' were picked up; big players like Lucent and Nokia have suffered rapid losses in the tens of billions. Protect your company, and job - this week's rumors are that even Mike Armstrong at AT&T might be bumped aside for TCI Malone, a very ambitious man. BellSouth has moved to customer self-installs, which had previously been limited to trials and resellers. "We installed 500 VoDSL lines in our first month," says Marc Sellouck, CEO of CLEC Transbeam. "We expect to have 10,000 lines installed by the end of the year." Vectris is up to 150 COs in 10 states. BlueStar, now Covad's direct sales arm, is moving in Tier 1 cities including Richmond, Norfolk, Atlanta, Miami, and Minneapolis. NAS, which in 1999 was opening COs faster than Bell Atlantic, called its 75% cut in capital spending a 'Smart Build', aiming for self-funding by 2003. Big brother SBC just signed a $600M deal with Covad and the capital markets are tight, so they had little choice but to cut back. eTV World will be in New York the same days as DSLcon, so we'll miss the show; but those who can attend can learn what's coming on the fast internet we are building. Winfire (freedsl.com) signed with Bell Atlantic for 30,000 lines in Q4. Never underestimate the value of price. Deals: Cisco's purchase of Pixstream and Inktomi's $1.3B buy of Fast Forward suggest how important others consider video delivery. Our opinion is that any DSL equipment or network not designed to support a large selection of video choices is uncompetitive in two or three years, and already a major DLEC has told us they already must expensively reconfigure their network to deliver their CEO's vision of video. We know many smart people in this industry disagree with us. But we think the webcast of the Nebraska-San Jose State football game last week is a harbinger of what the consumer will want, and predict a mass migration to whomever offers the widest consumer choice in a few years. Intertainer, in trials with US West and Broadwing for movies on demand, can now deliver them directly to TVs using the Uniview set-top box. Chips: Conexant split in two was great news for our friends with options, who will have a major stake in a hot new company. But the 50% run-up in the stock price befuddles us. Either it's overvalued now or the street dramatically undervalued it before. ITeX announced they had shipped their millionth DSL chipset, many of which are the Alcatel licensed design. Compatibility is so high, even Alcatel is a customer. VDSL from the same chip as ADSL is the promise of Aware's new DMTflex technology. The same central office chips can support 8 channels of ADSL or a single VDSL port, using the Alcatel compatible DMT format. VDSL in general has a similar transistor and power budget as ADSL, at least for the modem, so the disparity will presumably be eliminated over time. Several chip vendors have told me VDSL should not be significantly more expensive than ADSL, but ADSL's volume manufacturing clearly means a lower price today. International:Telmex lost the Mexican election, and the government is proposing some unbundling regulations that may prove to have substance. So far, none of the DLECs have been willing to take them on. C'mon Covad - if you can go to Spain, you can cross the border into Mexico. Telstra's Ziggy Switkowski said the initial uptake of broadband Internet in Australia was likely to be gentle over the next year and then accelerate. "What we find is the uptake of these new age services is often slower than any of us project but once the community gets on board the acceleration is a lot faster than we have in our business case," according to Reuters. Bill Gates in Malaysia spoke of "awesome results" from government high-tech promotion and promised investment. But is that a government a philanthropist should be enthusiastic about? France's move toward unbundling is unnerving France Telecom, so may be real at last. Tiscali $5B buy of World Online creates a 3.5M user ISP that is second only to T-Online in Europe. Products: Cayman gateways are among the first to market, close to some major customer wins, and being adapted to 802.11 as well as HomeRF. Whoever can reliably deliver gateways, soon, will win a massive market. Competition: Sprint ordered 16,000 wireless routers from Hybrid for delivery this year. Add in the Stingers they are deploying, and ION is coming into place.