eWEEK: Spencer Places His Money on Antigua

While most dream of the Caribbean for its long beaches and warm breezes, some pine for its long craps tables and chilled drinks. Spencer falls into the latter category, which is why he took note when informed of the U.S. Congress' recent steps to ban online gambling. Apparently the move is upsetting to the island nation of Antigua, which licenses more than 100 online gambling dens. If a solution is not agreed to after an upcoming April 7 meeting in Geneva between the United States and Antigua, the island intends to drag the World Trade Organization into the fray.

When it comes to gambling, Spencer always assumes that the house wins, so the Kitty was surprised to hear CEO Dave House's gamble as head honcho of Allegro Networks has turned into a no-win. The multirouter startup, which fought an uphill battle for three years in the unforgiving telecom market, was recently forced to shut down due to poor revenues. The fallout from the WorldCom scandal definitely had an impact on Allegro, whose development of a new multirouter technology had been intended mainly to work with the carrier's edge router networks. House, an Intel Wunderkind who had jumped to Bay Networks and presided over its acquisition by Nortel, was recruited as Allegro CEO in 2000. Spencer had heard that House had taken some time off before the Allegro gig to climb California's Mount Whitney and to drive race cars.

A Tabby tattler was highly amused to see that 3Com announced a joint venture with Huawei Technologies—the company that Cisco is suing for allegedly reverse-engineering Cisco products and selling cheap bootleg copies of its IOS software in Asian markets. Cisco also accused the Chinese telecom equipment maker of selling knockoffs of its core switches and routers. The buzz is that the Huawei products in question supposedly were so close to Cisco's that they even shared the same bugs.

3Com will own 49 percent of the new venture, with an option to bump it to 51 percent in the next few years.

The tattler also fielded a rumor that 3Com might be looking to acquire Foundry Networks, Extreme Networks or Force10 Networks. The tattler's money was on Force10 as the likely purchase. Foundry and Extreme were just mentioned by Forrester Research as two companies that should be wary of upstarts like Huawei.

"I'd put my money into an Antiguan casino license," cackled the Kitty, "It seems like less of a gamble than the telecom industry."

Check out Spencer's latest Kattoon: Porn Surfers: Nonprofit Monitoring Service Will Tell Your Mom

Most Recent Rumor Columns: