Mapping the recovery

Yousef Javadi was named president of Sprint International in April 2001. Javadi, who served as COO of Primus Telecom North America during its growth spurt, is responsible for overseeing the buildout of Sprint's global backbone outside the U.S. Last week, Javadi spoke with Telephony's Vince Vittore about his view on the state of the global market.

Have prices for bandwidth and related services in Europe stopped falling?

In Europe, we've seen a significant shakeout of the second and third tier carriers. I'm of the opinion that the situation is stabilizing. Prices have more or less settled. Now there's a handful of carriers that would claim Europe as their lone territory. There's also only a small handful that would position themselves as global.

After the shakeout, is Sprint maintaining an overarching international philosophy?

First, the international carrier [capacity] market is a market we will continue building on. In terms of a raw infrastructure, there's a lot of it out there. I would suggest a lot of it will never go into service. The availability of it is going to enable the service, but it's not going to drive it. The second key strategy is being the primary provider to the global 1000 enterprises. That customer set is the type that wants a global product set. What's really attractive to us is that more and more of them are building private IP networks over the public Internet. The Internet-based network is growing very well. The prices for the enterprises are quite stable. Most these customers aren't just buying transport anymore.

Why did partnerships like GlobalOne and Concert fail?

The partnerships didn't work out because of a lot of governance issues. You weren't focused on the customer. One other thing is that the world has deregulated pretty significantly. I'm already in 29 countries. The model we're pursuing is to work with other carriers from an operational perspective. I'm not going to wire up the streets of London, for example. We're not going to be everything to everybody.

What are your thoughts on the Chinese and Indian markets?

We have bilateral service offerings with the three biggest carriers in China. They're buying Internet capacity. One of the things we see from a Western perspective is the language issue. Is it a growth opportunity, though? Yes. India, however, is ahead of China. The language issue isn't there, and the whole country just seems to be a little ahead.

Do you have any fear that WorldCom will emerge from bankruptcy and start a price war?

When we do the analysis looking at what they could sell [bandwidth] at and what it costs them, it's not below current price levels. It's also somewhat of a myth that they come out of bankruptcy with clean balance sheets. The new shareholders are the bondholders, and they're going to hold some debt over their heads.

Do you anticipate IP VPNs being the big service offering that most analysts have projected?

IP VPN has been slower to develop than anyone anticipated. Networking at the Layer 2 level provides a lot of flexibility, and it's a very elegant solution. We're starting to see companies build for that now. To do it at OC-3 rates, that's a game changer.

E-mail Vince Vittore at: vvittore@primediabusiness.com