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?

Comments

Why a dream come true?

[mindstrm]

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.

Re:Why a dream come true?

[_newwave_]

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.

Re:Why a dream come true?

[Manuka]

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.

No wonder it tanked

[Force]

For $100/month, they would provide local phone service, long distance service, and 8mbps down, 1mbps up DSL-like digital connection.

8 millibits per second? No wonder it tanked. :-P

Re:No wonder it tanked

[ENOENT]

Yup, 8 millibits per second. This counts as the first implementation of IP over humpback whale song, with ones encoded as "AHOOOOOOOOHHHhhh..." and zeroes encoded as "EEEEEEeeeeEEEEEeeEEEEE..."

Not only do you get phenomenal 8mbps download speeds, but also this development brings e-commerce and pr0n to the cetacean community.

MS as telco savior?

[gregwbrooks]

OK, so it's an Orwellian headline, but you do start to wonder if Microsoft's Windows-as-service will be a force to reignite consumer broadband in a few years.

"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 very good deal...

[sterno]

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.

It will be missed.

[kurtras]

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.

Re:It will be missed.

[Watts Martin]

Because as we know, products live and die in the marketplace based solely on how great the idea is, and profitability is one singular factor rather than an amalgamation. You never have to worry about things like capital for advertising and manufacturing, relationships with other vendors, and unexpected resource limitations, let alone less "open" issues like exclusive deals between distributors and competitors, legal but unsavory tactics like "Scorched Earth" policies (Wal-Mart's phrasing, not mine), and so on.

The market's a wonderful thing, but when we say it rewards what's profitable, we often take that to mean that it rewards delivering the best possible product at the best possible price. But those two things are not identical. Many people recognized that DR-DOS was a better product than MS-DOS; at the start of the PC era, CP/M-86 was arguably a better product than PC-DOS. It lost first due to missteps by Digital Research and later on due to Microsoft's unethical OEM contracts. Note that I'm not commenting on the legality, but in my opinion requiring your customers to pay for your product whenever they use a competitor's is pretty seedy--and it's undeniably taking active steps to avoid competition on the open market.

I can't comment about Sprint's ION service specifically, but having worked in telecom for a while, I know that even for the largest companies there are a lot of factors that can get in the way of rolling out services in a timely fashion that you can't control. You're dependent not only on your vendors but usually on your competitors for critical parts of any large order, which can make for a marketplace which--while workable in its own way--is certainly nothing Adam Smith could ever have envisioned.

Wonder why it tanked?

[d.valued]

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.

Re:Way too expensive - NOT

[Tix]

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.

Technical hurdles for an advanced service

[PureFiction]

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.