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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?
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.
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.
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.