Sprint's big net gamble

By David Rohde
Network World, 6/8/98

New York - Sprint Corp. last week threw its hat into the convergence ring, announcing a new network architecture that aggregates voice and data traffic into ATM cells at the customer premise and ships it end-to-end over broadband facilities.

[Network diagram] The new platform is called the Integrated On-Demand Network, or ION. The platform will potentially support any type of voice, data or video stream from users and ship it over leased digital subscriber lines or dedicated fiber access lines to Sprint ATM service nodes.

Largely complete in the backbone but still a work in progress at the edge, ION resembles several new, heavily publicized carrier networks, but with one big difference: It's all ATM from the customer premises out, rather than presenting a native IP face to the wide area.

Sprint Chairman and CEO William Esrey gave ION a big send-off at a Broadway theater. In a presentation that was notably light on technical details, Esrey claimed ION will allow customers to save up to 70% on the price of a phone call and provide a speed up to 100 times faster than that of a 56K bit/sec Internet connection.

But some analysts had questions about Sprint's announcement when it became clear that none of the prospective ION services are ready and that Sprint would have to obtain access to customer sites via competitors' facilities.

"They've got a hole in the subscriber relationship [area]," said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., a technology assessment and research firm in Voorhees, N.J. "They haven't articulated a strategy to create, provision and make accessible these applications."

Potential Sprint competitors rushed to heap scorn on ION.

"I think it's dead on arrival," said Guy Cook, vice president of global product management for Qwest Communications International, Inc., an emerging national broadband carrier. "It's enormously expensive and incredibly risky because the entire industry has already recognized that IP is the way to go with regard to integrated access."

Sprint officials said they are not ready to reveal actual ION services and prices, but beta tests will begin during the second half of the year, with commercial rollout in mid-1999. And Sprint was quick to note that IP, as well as other protocols, will be supported over the network's ATM cell structure.

ION is based on an ATM switching core running over a high-speed Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) transport, an infrastructure that Sprint has been installing since 1994. But much depends on devices used at the edge of the network that Sprint is developing with its key ION partners - Bellcore and Cisco Systems, Inc.

At each of seven initial ION Service Nodes, Sprint will employ a Magellan Vector switch from Nortel to provide switching and trunk termination. To provide recognition of the traffic type - be it voice, data or video - Sprint and Bellcore are jointly developing high-end applications known as Service Manager, Security Manager and Feature Manager, according to Marty Kaplan, Sprint's chief technology officer.

Feature Manager in particular will enable Sprint to emulate services provided by traditional "Class 5" circuit switches - the type used by local exchange carriers. As a result, Sprint could, for example, complete ordinary local telephone calls with features such as call waiting.

"The part of this that concerns me is that Bellcore is not an organization that's known for its expedited product development," Nolle said.

To obtain local access to a business customer's site, Sprint will employ what it calls the Broadband Metropolitan Area Network (BMAN). Typically this will consist of OC-3 or OC-12 high-speed rings circling an urban area and OC-3 collector circuits traversing major concentrations of commercial sites.

However, in a major departure from the strategy of all its principal competitors, which either own or are buying competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC), Sprint will not actually build or own the BMAN circuits. Instead, Sprint will lease them from regional Bell operating companies or CLECs.

To provide ION service to smaller businesses and residential users, Sprint will purchase the local loop to the customer site as a so-called unbundled network element from RBOCs or CLECs. Kevin Brauer, Sprint's president of national integrated services, indicated that Sprint may then put DSL electronics on the line themselves or buy an actual DSL loop. Sprint officials emphasized, however, that the company could support a "myriad" of dial-up access methods.

Users were adopting a wait-and-see attitude on these access options. "I don't understand it if they're going to try to do it on copper," said Dawn Sutherland, network administrator for Regency Realty Corp. in Atlanta. If Sprint does succeed in obtaining a fiber route into her building, "I would be very interested in this, but only if Sprint takes full responsibility for whoever they're leasing, begging or borrowing the fiber from."

To run the ION services, Sprint will have to install a business hub at the customer premise. These ATM access devices will be dedicated to one user or shared by multiple tenants in an office building. The initial users of ION service are expected to use Magellan Passport ATM switches from Nortel.

But by year-end, Sprint officials said they will switch their preferred supplier of the business hub to Cisco, which recently announced several IP-capable ATM service nodes. The expectation is that Sprint users will be able to plug in their PBXs, fax servers, LAN hubs and other network gear to the Cisco box to run multimedia traffic over a single high-speed access link.

Sprint marketing officials said they have not yet decided whether to charge users separately for the business hub or to build it into the monthly charges for the ION products. The question about the equipment cost was another concern for users.

"I'm in a huge 23-story building," Sutherland said. "What if I'm the only one out of hundreds of tenants who's interested [in ION]? Do I have to pay for the whole thing?"