SPRINT SEEKS MESH MIGRATION FOR ITS DOMESTIC BACKBONE

Sprint is nearing the selection of a vendor to help convert its national backbone from a ring-based architecture to an optical mesh starting next year. The company said it is in the “final stages of evaluation,” having narrowed its choices to “two or three” vendors.

Sprint’s domestic optical mesh network contract is likely to be awarded in the fourth quarter and could be worth upwards of $100 million, according to UBS Warburg, which named Ciena, Nortel Networks and Sycamore Networks the likeliest contenders, eclipsing Alcatel and Lucent Technologies. Sprint, a major Ciena customer, already uses the vendor’s CoreDirectors for its international mesh network.

Oliver Valente, Sprint’s vice president of technology development, said the carrier is considering all-optical alternatives but is seeking a “combination ADM and broadband digital cross-connect.” Valente called the $100 million estimate high, but said the contract would be worth “tens of millions of dollars” over the next three years.

But even an eight-figure deal would make a highly coveted prize for Ciena, which reported $73.5 million in revenues in the second quarter (ending April 30)—a 15% drop from the previous year. For Sycamore, the win would be even more significant; its second-quarter revenues were $10.6 million, down 28% from the year-earlier quarter. Nortel already is a Sprint supplier but, according to Yankee Group analyst Patrick Matthews, is still focused on ring-based deployment.

Sprint, which has been rethinking its attitude in several areas of technology since an executive shakeup earlier in the year, wouldn’t be the first major interexchange carrier to migrate from a ring-based network to a mesh. AT&T began deploying an optical mesh in the third quarter of 2001 and now has 104 Ciena CoreDirectors deployed in more than 80 cities, according to AT&T CTO Hossein Eslambolchi. Left unsaid is how much of the carrier’s domestic network has been converted. AT&T’s not telling. Eslambolchi said only that the 2001 mesh network buildout was completed this month but that “less than half” of the carrier’s traffic travels through a mesh.

Mesh networks generally save 25% to 35% on transmission costs, which make up the lion’s share of expense in a long-haul network, according to Tom Mock, Ciena’s senior vice president of LightWorks and solutions. And with point-and-click provisioning, another key benefit of meshes, carriers generally can save 10% to 25% in operating expenses. Meshes also allow for varied grades of traffic protection for tiered services.

However, meshes are more complex than Sonet networks, a fact that Sprint is taking into account. “We’ll look for as simple a solution as possible,” Valente said.