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Sprint ION's $100/mo, 8Mbps Home Service Tanks
Dr. Zowie writes: "In the current gloomy high speed connection market, a ray of light was Sprint's ION service. For $100/month, they would provide local phone service, long distance service, and 8mbps down, 1mbps up DSL-like digital connection. I've been waiting for the service to turn on to write a review about it -- but the service has been discontinued and all orders are being cancelled. Too bad -- ION was like a geek dream come true." ION was only available to a relative handful of people, but it sure sounded good. Anyone have suggestions for this sort of combination service?
they might have succeeded. I remember hearing sprint ION ads non-stop on the radio about 2 or 3 months ago. I guess it must have been available in my area (Houston, TX). Unfortunately, the ads made no mention of this 8mbps down/1mbps up. This was the first time I had heard of the speeds associated with this service. All the radio ads ever said were "faster than dial-up", which is an advertising phrase I tend to ignore as easily as "we'll pay off your old car!".
$100 sounds like a bargain for this sort of thing, and I would probably have snagged that service if I had known about the speed!
Of course I realize that none of the broadband services cites specific speeds, but even saying "up to 8mbps" would have immediately attracted my attention.
Actually, they had two levels of service. For around $140/month, you could get 8mb/2mb DSL like Internet service, 2 local phone lines, and long distance service. For $120/month you could get the same service at 4mb/1mb speeds.
If you don't see it...please point me to any service where I can get comparable speeds for under $400/month.
Long distance is not included with any phone line. Long distance is provided by a third party. in the case of ION, your long distance was handled by Sprint, and you got a block of minutes.
What most people didn't know is that calls between ION nodes were treated as local, since they were routed over the ION ATM network, and nevcer had to jump onto the telco's lines.
Sprint promised delivery over three years ago. I'm not sure I would characterize it as a "ray of light", maybe a "burst of steam". This article was written in 1999:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-341445.html
-- Sherman Boyd www.twocell.com www.shermanboyd.com
for those interested in what ion was offering, check out: http://www.sprintbiz.com/business/ion.html
geek friendly VPS's and free API enabled DNS : zerigo.com
Never saw better then 1024/768. The line was done more then it was up. Ended up having to program SprintION's Tech Support number into my cell phone. The bill was a joke. Got the first bill for $212. Called said and had it corrected, payed $196, then for then for the next 4 months had a credit. Called them and explained the problem. Was told it would be fixed.. NOT.. Finally after six months I moved and disconetced the service. Was told since I broke the 2 year contract I would have to pay $400.00 for the equitment and install. Gave them my new address and waited for the next bill.. It came, still showing a credit.. Never thought I would have a hard time trying to get a company to take my money.. No wonder there going belly up..
_______________________________ Anyone want to lend me a sig???
My boss has the Sprint ION service here in Austin Texas and he loves it. One of the main problems that I saw with the service, after talking to him about it, is that only homeowners could get the it. No apartments. There goes more than half the market right there.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
It wasn't dsl-like, it was dsl. They wanted you to think it wasn't because of all the negative attention dsl has gotten lately, with all the dsl companies around drying up.
It was an interesting concept, but poorly implemented. It used Lucent (Ascend) Stinger DSLAMs, which are not a good choice. It seems the Stinger has one que for all traffic on the access (DSL) side, which meant that your voice data had to wait in line behind your data traffic. I was waiting to get it here to see if you ran into problems with moving tons of data and trying to be on the phone at the same time. Too bad that won't happen.
The service was never meant to be a home service, it was meant for businesses. When that didn't take off so well they switched gears to try to get customers, which is why service areas were lacking for the home market. I know that in Denver for example, if you are not downtown you can forget about it.
This is terrible not just because it was an opportunity to get a lot of bandwidth for cheap that is now gone, but because this is a BIG nail in the coffin for other DSL companies. No one was funding these projects and they have yet another big excuse with this news. Something along the lines of "If Sprint couldn't do it, why do you think you can?" comes to mind.
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I don't think the service really worked the way Sprint said it would. A friend of mine got it installed in his apartment (a special case apparently) and he had nothing but trouble from the start. Sprint told him that they tested to his apartment and that he would have the full 8Mbps speed on his connection. After it was installed, he was getting about 1 Mbps but it was bumped to 4 because we have a very good friend who worked in the ION division (I guess not anymore) in their network monitoring area. The voice service was crappy quality and he wasn't happy from the beginning. After two months he got DSL and never looked back. ION looked a lot better on paper than it worked out.
...is that they aren't widely available. It's the same with traditional DSL. There is a certain percentage of people who want it, but they're scattered over the whole country, many in small towns and rural areas. The buildout costs are high enough that it's expensive to reach these people, but without a sufficient subscriber base, your service will fail. I've dealt with people in areas where getting anything over 33.6 kbps is damn near impossible. For them, ISDN is still high-speed access, and many can't even get that. Satellite? Yeah, it's there, but it's still too costly, and the latency is a huge drawback. Cable? Yeah, when it works, and assuming you have a local staff competent enough to maintain it properly. Wireless? Possibly, but the cost of the radios is way too high for consumers.
There's been talk here about public-access 802.11b networks in cities. That's fine, but small towns could benefit more, assuming you could find a way to get the data out to the Net affordably. These people may not see broadband for a long time unless someone gets really creative.
And as for ION, I would have gotten it if it was available, and I know other folks who would have as well. Perhaps they just couldn't afford to have expanded the service, but expanding into new areas is the only way to succeed. And where was their marketing? I haven't seen an ION ad in years.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
As a (soon former) ION customer, it is/was a good deal:
On my setup known as the XT-2 plan
2 Voice lines - originally VoDSL but now VoIP over DSL
250 Minutes LD included $0.07 after
2 static IP addresses
Data connection with 40msec pings throughout the Sprint backbone (not so good for gaming but it was ALWAYS 40msec!)
1Megbit/sec down guaranteed - I was getting around 2.5Mbps
128Kbps upload guaranteed - 600-900Kbps for me
and I was @ 14278ft
The closer to the C.O. you were the faster it was.
I called my local telco today to start preparing for the shutdown;
DSL $69.95 for 384Kbps-1.5Mbps down and capped at 128Kbps up.
ONE voice line for $34.98 with no calling features other than "standard" Call-waiting and call-forwarding.
So that means for $104.93 I won't have half the capability that I had under ION.
I just wish Sprint had done a better marketing job in few cities they were in, but 4000 customers is a lot with virtually no marketing.
But $4 BILLION is a lot of money over 5 years, so I can't blame them for cutting their loses.
FuckedCompany post Sprint is going to lay off 6000 people. In the forum it seems a lot of it has to deal with ION.
For me, I will still get on the net with my 56k modem to check e-mail until I got some cash to burn in this tough economy to get DSL...
Well, I'm in Kansas City (Sprint's world headquarters), and my understanding is that IONs biggest hurdle was the local telco (Southwestern Bell), which resulted in very limited access.
Also, Sprint is laying off 6000 works and 1500 contract workers, most in KC, looks like crunch time for Sprint.
Check out http://www.pcwebopedia.com/TERM/D/DOCSIS.html
DOCSIS, the standard most cablemodem companies use, is capable of around 27-36Mbps transfers over copper. (up to 10Mbps upstream)
I had ordered SprintION, and although the sales drone said that they could test the line with my existing DSL, but that was wrong, my line did not qualify and the return call from SprintION claimed it was due to my existing DSL. At that point I just said forget it.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
A friend in Southern California has (had?) this service.
Actually, ping times suck. Nothing less than 100 ms. It handles all your voice/data on a single ATM line, and (IANAIG "infrastructure guy") none of the switches between here and Kansas know how to split the signal. All your traffic goes to the Sprint office in Kansas and is split from there. He said it's bad for Quake.
ION is a great service. For a few more weeks at least.
My cost is $150 a month here's what I get:
8Mbps/1Mbps DSL (mine actually clocked out at 6M/800K)
2 static IP addresses
4 phone lines (on one pair wires)
Voice mail
750 minutes of US long distance
1-800 number (well 1-888 number)
In addition, the DSL does NOT use PPOE. The service agreement was very lienient, allowing me to run my own web/mail/etc... services. I couldn't resell any of those services (couldn't become my own ISP) and they had a lot of CYA notes for copyright infringement.
During code red/nimda inbound port 80 was never blocked.
Initial install was a typical DSLHell story, and the whole system for about 4 months. I went through 4 ION boxes before the system stablized. Its been rock solid for the last year and half.
I'm going to miss my ION. It was worth every penny.
I worked on the Sprint ION project for over a year as a software engineer, and I got to know the system pretty well.
The reasons it ran into such massive monetary and technical problems are involved, and many I don't even know about. But I do know a little, and the ION project is still a fascinating system regardless.
(please forgive the acronyms and jargon, some of this may be a bit obscure if you are not familiar with ATM or switched networks)
Integrated On-demand Network
ION was one of the first projects to bring converged digital services to the consumer/small business. This meant digital phone service in addition to high speed broadband service.
Sprint decided to implement all of these services over an ATM network. ATM AAL2 rt-vbr (realtime variable bit rate) was great for carrying compressed voice traffic over switched digital networks. AAL5 was used for IP transport (ala classical IPoATM). And for management of the end point devices, the RISH's as they called them (Residential Integrated Services Hub) there was an ATM AAL2 cbr (constant bit rate) connection.
So, you had a DSL line rated at 8Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps up. Over this DSL connection was an ATM layer, which in turn supported the three PVC's mentioned above for voice,data and signalling/mgmt.
At the time, the speed itself was a big plus. 8Mbps/1.5Mbps was way more than most DSL providers offered. In addition, you also got four phone lines that shared the voice pvc. Four phone lines and data over a single copper pair!
The voice channels were configured for VBR ATM traffic, which meant that you only used part of your 8/1.5Mbps bandwidth for voice traffic when you were actually making calls. For every call in progress you ate about 64kbps of bandwidth. As soon as the call was released, the bandwidth was again available for data communications.
The business oriented ION service allowed you to plug in as many voice lines as you wanted (up to about 32 max, simply plug in more voice cards) and could use T1 or HDSL connectivity depending on your configuration. And again, you only ate into the data bandwidth when calls were actually in progress.
Those are all the well known features, but there was also a lot of possibilities that Sprint had dreamed up for ION.
Since everything from Sprint's internal backbone out all the way to the customer's RISH was ATM, you could configure ATM SVC's with true Quality of Service. Were arent talking IP URGENT flags, this is true, real time quality of service. Things like video conferencing between ION customers was possible, with no jitter, no degraded voice quality. it was perfect. And only ION had the capability to provide such high quality of service features directly into the home (you need ATM for this level of QoS)
Video on demand was another popular topic. Internet video suffers from all kinds of congestion and low bandwidth. ION promised high speed DSL service with ATM QoS that would provide seemless, high quality video transmission.
In short, ION had a number of strong technical features in the architecture itself, which could provide a number of services which could never be supported over traditional internet broadband.
"On the bleeding edge, you simply bleed..."
That was a favorite quote made by a fellow developer. ION was ambitious. And everything about ION seemed to call for bleeding edge technogloy, from networking equipment to development tools, to provisioning and managment.
The network layer, HDSL, ATM AAL2/5 PVCs to the home was technically challenging. The switches required to take multiple OC3 connections from the DSLAM's that all the RISH's connected to had to support ATM AAL2 vbr, AAL5, and IP over ATM. These were incredibly expensive switches to handle the SVC soft switching and IP ATM routing/switching. Every regional location had to have one of these bad boys and at a price of roughly 2.5 million each, they racked up a steep cost very quickly.
ATM is also a switched networking protocol. For every customer, there were three PVC's which had to be manually provisioned into the various ATM switches and DSLAMs. On top of that, every voice connection (phone line) required an SVC to be setup, and connected to the desired location. Soft switching telephone networking was and is a relatively new system, and it was both expensive and difficult to maintain.
The software developed in house to support ION was also complex. Everything from order entry to configuration to network provisioning was supposed to be automated. This required a lot of diverse groups within Sprint to coordinate and interoperate using CORBA and other messaging / middle ware. Getting such a system operational and stable proved to be a very difficult and costly affair. The number of steps between an operator entering an ION customer order, to a network technician installing the device, to servers providing the RISH firmware and configuration data was high. There were a lot of points of failure, and getting this massive set of software systems to work was a major source of time and money drain.
"Timing is everything..."
In short, ION was a bit ahead of its time, and due to various delays, it didn't become available it its truly usefull form until it was already too late. The economic slowdown and broadband crunch started towards the end of 2000, and ION really didnt reach a viable point for widespread deployment until mid 2001. The timing was bad, and the ambitious and challenging nature of ION proved to be too costly in both time and money.
I am really sad to see it go. I put a lot of time and effory to write code that was supposed to be part of a new kind of communication infrastructure. I worked with a lot of really smart people there who also put a lot of effort into it, and most of them (actually, almost all of them) have been laid off as of last week.
ION itself had a lot of promise. High speed internet access and phone service was just the beginning of what it could provide.
Am I spoiled, or does net access in the States suck just that much?
$40CDN gets me 6Mbit down, 1MBit up cable access.
$30CDN gets me my phone service.
I pay as I go for long distance. I don't use it a whole lot.
So, that's a grand total of $70CDN a month. Factor in that it's Canadian money, and that's a mere $45US.
You're the people pioneering this technology. Don't take it sitting down. It's pretty pathetic that your telcos are bullying you into those prices.
I had (have!) this service. The only problem I had is that whole area codes could not be reached directly from my phone (I live in Denver and could not call anywhere in Colorado Springs, for example).
The other phone issue was that for as long as I've had it, Caller ID has worked about three times out of hundreds of calls.
I never did bother to get either issue resolved (who uses phones anymore?), but I'll miss the service - I found the speed a lot better than other solutions (I used to have Qwest DSL).
Slashdot was the first I'd heard of this - Oh well, back to the Broadband drawing board!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone ever read the TOS?
They owned the data passing through the network. Yes, your info, or your company info. Viewing porn was a TOS violation as was hosting a website, mail server etc.
Pretty ugly TOS and one that I would never sign off on.