Sprint Rolls Out High-Speed Local Data Service
July 1, 1998
PC Week via NewsEdge Corporation : As part of its new
integrated on-demand Network data strategy, Sprint
Corp. has reached local access agreements with
Southwestern Bell Corp., GTE Corp., BellSouth Corp. and
Ameritech Corp. to offer high-speed data services
directly to customers' premises.
Via the interconnection agreements, services based on
the ION platform will be available in Chicago, Atlanta,
Dallas, Houston and Kansas City, Mo., by this fall.
Pending successful negotiations with Bell Atlantic Corp.
and US West Corp., service will be introduced in New
York and Denver at a date yet to be determined, pending
interconnection agreements, said Sprint officials in
Kansas City.
Planned services, which include local and long-distance
voice, IP, frame relay, and ATM, will be offered on
high-speed local data circuits leased from local providers
and connected to Sprint's nationwide data network at
speeds between 1.544M bps and 155M bps.
The Sprint ION platform will provide services to
businesses in Sprint's targeted cities via its nationwide
SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) ring- based
fiber-optic network. The SONET network will link to
businesses through broadband metropolitan area
networks that Sprint is leasing from the incumbent
Regional Bell Operating Companies and GTE.
"I'm pretty impressed," said Steve Huffman, CIO of
Phelps Dodge Corp., in Phoenix. "I'm particularly
interested in high-bandwidth data services to the home"
for telecommuters, Huffman said.
Although Phelps Dodge has existing contracts for data
services, the company is considering renegotiating them
to take advantage of the new competition Sprint is
providing in local data services, he said.
The primary benefits of the Sprint ION services to
corporations include reducing the number of data
service providers with which they must contend, as well
as the opportunity to reduce access costs to connect
corporate sites to a provider's network, said Michael
Gettles, lead engineer for advanced technology
development at Sprint.
The services initially will offer customers bandwidth in
fixed increments, although the ION effort includes the
development of variable bandwidth services that will let
customers dynamically allocate capacity on their circuits
to match the changing transmission requirements of
various corporate applications, Gettles said. The
dynamic bandwidth capability on the Sprint network will
be added to the services in an upcoming phase of the
initiative later this year and will be made commercially
available by the third quarter of 1999, he said.
Subsequent enhancements to the ION service platform
will include the addition of digital subscriber line
services at speeds of up to 6M bps that will be available
directly to telecommuters, remote offices or small
businesses, Sprint officials said.
Sprint can be reached at (800) 308-2140 or
www.sprint.com.
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