Frank Ianna, executive vice president of network and computing services at AT&T, saluted Sprint Corp. for entering the convergence market but added that AT&T is likewise testing ATM gateway devices at customer sites to concentrate voice and data traffic.
Q. AT&T is purchasing Teleport Communications Group, Inc. and moving to an edge-switch architecture. How do you compare that with Sprint's network announcement?
A. I think the thing that was missing was that [Sprint] didn't offer any particular solution to the last mile other than they can use a variety of technologies, which is obvious.
The investment in the last mile is the key to breaking the [regional Bell operating company] bottleneck and getting those savings.
Q. Sprint did say one of its approaches would be to purchase unbundled network elements conditioned as digital subscriber lines.
A. They want to use these unbundled network elements to get into the customer premises and bypass the [RBOC] switching office functionality entirely. That's a good idea, but the key has always been to deploy some of your own facilities and other alternative technologies, such as wireless, to gain some leverage. And it still leaves something to be desired on the business side, where getting penetration into those buildings with the fiber-optic serving rings is really the key.
Q. Are savings on the order of magnitude that Sprint talked about possible?
A. Clearly for on-net traffic you can get the full savings and full benefit of [voice and data] integration into ATM.
But it will take some time to replicate the features of circuit-switched voice services.
Q. Can Sprint pull this off with seven initial Service Nodes scattered around the country?
A. It depends on how much traffic they have. Seven could be enough, unless they get a tremendous amount of traffic.
Eventually you're going to have to go out to the edge because a large portion of the cost is at the edge.
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