By Joanie Wexler
Network World, 06/27/94

Washington, D.C.

Sprint Corp. last week became the first carrier to expand its Internet access services internationally in an attempt to give customers consistent, higher speed connections around the globe through one carrier.

The new Global SprintLink service will allow corporate customers in Europe, the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific region to access the worldwide information net at speeds from 128K to 2M bit/sec, compared to typical 64K bit/sec foreign Internet connections today.

"This could be cheaper for customers because usually, access in other countries is more expensive than in the States," said Tony Rutkowski, executive director of the Internet Society, the organization that oversees standardization and development of the Internet. He predicted that many Sprint competitors will launch similar services in the next few months.

Farooq Hussain, sprint's product manager of Internet services, said one service goal is to enable customers to get multiple, cost-effective Internet services from one carrier. However, "we're not in a direct head-to-head competitive [pricing] situation with local service providers," he said.

Global SprintLink is being offered over high-speed backbones in London, Paris, Stockholm, Sweden and Tokyo. Hussain said Sprint intends to expand the net significantly during the fourth quarter.

While he would not commit to exact expansion plans, Hussain said Sprint is eyeing "most European capitals and quite a bit of the Asia-Pacific."

Today, high-capacity access links to the Internet are concentrated on the two coasts of the U.S., so many customers route international Internet traffic back to the U.S.

Young & Rubicam, Inc. (Y&R), a New York-based worldwide advertising agency, is hoping that its primary carrier, AT&T, will offer such a service, said Nick Di Iorio, director of networking and telecommunications.

Y&R is building a high-speed link to the Internet from New York via AT&T frame relay links. "Down the road, I might have enough traffic to run my own pipe out of London, then out of Hong Kong. But which provider I go with will depend on cost and the amount of traffic I have," he said.

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