What about ION?
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For nearly a year and a half, Sprint has practically wrapped its entire public identity around the concept of the Integrated On-Demand Network. ION is an ATM-based convergence service based on specialized carrier-managed customer premises equipment and a single broadband access line for voice and data. Sprint CEO William Esrey touts ION everywhere he goes.
But the service has been slow to roll out and has had little effect on the market. And although for now MCI WorldCom officials say they'll find a role for ION in the merged company, analysts are debating what the firm will really do with it.
"It was an interesting marketing ploy for 18 months," says Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects, a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. "I don't see MCI following through on it." Sprint has to build separate points of presence for ION, he says, making it an expensive proposition for the carrier; one that has already lost a fair amount of money.
TeleChoice broadband analyst Cathy Gadecki agrees. An ATM-based convergence service can help enterprises save money on their internal networks, she says: "But the world has moved on from that."
Many of the same companies that could have bought ION, she says, are now fired up by the prospect of using telecommunications to make, rather than save, money - and that means an IP-based extranet for electronic commerce.
However, Giga Information Group telecom analyst Lisa Pierce says that MCI WorldCom's labs have been working on an ATM-based converged voice/data network similar to ION. So she believes that MCI WorldCom will in fact make ION part of its product portfolio.
But users are also looking for ways to incorporate voice in ordinary frame relay and IP networks, Pierce says. And Network World last week confirmed that over the summer, Sprint quietly rolled out a voice over frame relay service to its sales force even while publicly promoting ION.
Under the new service, Sprint places and manages a Cisco 3810 voice-enabled router on the customer premise - or allows the customer to install its own Sprint-certified voice frame relay access device, such as those offered by Nuera or Nortel's Micom division. These devices typically produce 8K bit/sec of compressed voice, and Sprint scales up the committed information rate, or guaranteed bandwidth, on the frame relay circuit to a multiple of 8K bit/sec. Under the service, users can even dial in to a remote PBX over the frame relay network and place local calls in a distant city, cutting out long-distance tolls even on calls outside the enterprise.
That kind of incremental service may be an easier one for users to swallow than a full migration to ION, and even loyal Sprint customers may not cry in their soup if ION doesn't make the merger cut. "The arrangement didn't make sense to us," says George Sullivan of Northrop Grumman, who recently had his Sprint representative in to talk about ION. "If you put all your eggs in one basket and you have a single access line, what happens if it breaks? You can't leave a voice mail to say your e-mail is down, and you can't leave an e-mail to say your voice is down."
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