Sprint Corp. today will unveil plans for a wide-scale network redesign that the company says will cut the price of long-distance calls by 70% and increase capacity by 17 times, according to several published reports.
Dubbed FastBreak, the new network has already cost Sprint $2 billion over the past two years and will be partially operational by year-end, said reports in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Instead of operating on the traditional switched circuit design - where a circuit is opened between two phones for the duration of a call - FastBreak will use high-speed switches, routers (mostly from Cisco Systems, Inc.) and optical fiber. The idea is a single line will be able to accommodate simultaneous voice calls and also packets of data sent over the Internet.
FastBreak will break up traffic into packets, sending them over many different routes and recombining them at the destination, the reports said. Customers will have one big pipe - into their office or home - that is "always on" and can handle Internet access and voice calls at the same time. Sprint will bill users for the number of digital bits that pass over the network, not on the number of minutes the person is connected to the network. However, users will have to pay to have a box installed that will measure the digital bits used per month.
The FastBreak network, which Sprint called an "Integrated On-demand Network" or ION in the reports, will let users access the Internet at speeds of up to 100 times faster than traditional modems. Because users pay only for what data capacity they send, using FastBreak would be cheaper than leasing a line that might not always be used to full capacity, Sprint said in the reports.
While FastBreak is not an upgrade of Sprint's existing network, it will be able to communicate with older telecommunications networks, the reports said. Sprint will have to seek cooperation from local phone companies, which must provide Sprint access to their customers so the telco can link FastBreak directly to existing lines. It is most likely that Sprint will seek to put FastBreak switches in local switching centers, thereby bypassing traditional interconnect agreements.
Sprint plans to roll the service out in stages: to large corporations by the end of 1998, to all businesses by mid-1999 and to consumers by late 1999, the reports said. The cost of the service has not yet been determined.
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