Slashdot Mirror
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?
I don't see it.
Having everything on one line is a technical utopia...
but I'd rather see everything over one network.
You see.. even if everything comes in over one line for $100/mo.. how is that different from $30/mo for a phone line, and $50/mo for DSL?
Also.. what do you mean 'long distance'. Long distance service is not relveant... you get that with any phone line.
8 millibits per second? No wonder it tanked. :-P
Home phone service worth ~$20 a month.
Long distance worth ~$20 a month. (Currently free with many cell-phone plans)
Broadband access worth ~$40 a month.
Total = $80 a month.
I just don't see 100 bucks a month being a particularly good deal. It would be convenient to have everything under one package, but not worth paying a premium.
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.
"Push" sure didn't get consumer broadband to the tipping point; neither did e-commerce, voice over IP or Joe Cartoon's not-ready-for-TV rich media.
But here's the thing: Short of Intel declaring that all machines using its chips need a broadband connection, about the broadest way to encourage Bubba PC User into broadband is to tweak the OS in such a way that it forces involuntary connections -- connections for things like product activation, Passport use, etc.
There's a mountain of DSL research that says Bubba was buying DSL (when he bought it at all) primarily for the always-on feature, not for the speed. Folks don't like the dial-up process. Well, Microsoft is heading down a path that will force a lot more dialing up, so it's a safe bet there might be a lot more interest in always-on connections.
Yeah, I know: A chicken-and-egg scenario -- is Microsoft betting that pervasive Internet connectivity means less consumer fussing over the forced connections or are they assuming that people will find easier ways to make connections if they're forced to do it more often? Not sure the answer matters, really... but it's safe to assume XP (or, more likely, the sure-to-be-more-invasive successor to XP) will send more consumers down the broadband path.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Okay, under my current set up I pay:
$89/month for 1.5/384 DSL
$30/month or so for phone service
$5-10/month for long distance service
So for $100/month I could get:
8Mb/1Mb data
local calling
500 minutes long distance included (and rest being at like 7-10 cents/minute)
For a power user it was definitely a deal because you get more bandwidth and a consolidated bill.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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
I don't want this to sound like an obituary, but ION really was a great idea. Though it never came to my area, it was just like some of the other FTTH services that we saw earlier in the 90's - voice, data, and eventually video all on one line, through one provider. Admittedly, ION had issues, but overall, the service was good, with plenty of bandwidth, and you got everything from one provider. Plus, as I recall, their TOS/AUP was not as bad as most DSL providers - that is, you could run servers, and add routers/home networks.
In short, it was spectacular service with high prices and low demand. So, it died. Oh well.
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???
Nice play with semantics.
Now, seriously.. Not many people really need this 'service'. Sure, it's nice to have less-than-zero ping times for Q3A (or whatever massively multiplayer game thou hast the time to waste playing), or for *loading kernels, but outisde Silicon Valley in the more 'traditional business' areas, not too many people would really need it.
The worst part is that those bandwidth would have to be peak bandwidths, as that much pipe costs an awful lot of money. (Have you priced T3's and OC's lately?)
The dot-bomb implosion, the fall of Nasdaq, the recessionary economy, and the 11-9 aftermath killed 'em. People with the money to spend started to cut their personal costs, and this sort of service went poof.
I believe that the only way to get reliable fat pipe for the forseeable future is from the established telcos, and it's going to be a little more expensive.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
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.
ft
...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.
But I refuse to do business with Sprint because they screwed us up once, and caused a lot of damage to my credit history.
Two years ago, we moved to a new house, and thought that we had notified our long distance carrier. But after a month, we figured that Sprint long distance jumped in to take our account, without our consent, and charged us $2.71/min to call NYC. The total charge was about $70. After 6 months of phone calls and tons of frustrations, Sprint even dare to give that to a collection company. And that put a nasty spot on my credit history. Eventually, we tried to get over it and paid the god-damned amount.
However, we swear not to give any business to Sprint anymore. We immediately cancelled all our PCS accounts (two of them, and at an average fee of $180/mo, as we were always over the limit) which we had for more than 2 years.
And we discover Sprint did this to a lot of people, including their long-time customers.
So, even if Sprint can provide any high-speed access at a low cost, and even if I don't have any other alternative, I'll give shit to Sprint.
This ION thingy is born dead, and good for them.
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
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.