Business as usual

The sale of Sprint's only local calling property in the Chicago suburbs to Ameritech last week was a business decision, not a "strategic move,' said a Sprint spokesman.

Known as Sprint/Centel until 1993, when it became known as Sprint, the company served a small portion of Chicago's Northwest Side and all or part of 10 northwest suburbs. The transaction, the value of which was not disclosed, adds 136,000 residential and customer business lines to Ameritech's holdings.

Although the sale leaves Sprint without a local tie to Illinois' most populated area, it does not necessarily indicate the carrier's intentions toward the local calling market, a spokesman insisted.

Industry analysts have speculated that Sprint, MCI and AT&T have little interest in getting into the local calling market, though they are now free to do so under the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act. The expense of building their own local networks isn't worth it, many say.

That scenario does not apply to Sprint, the spokesman said.

"In 19 states, we have 7 million access lines where we are the incumbent provider," he said. "And as a [competitive local exchange carrier], we are working to enter markets across the country.

Over the past month, a series of events has occurred in California and New Jersey that will change the way carriers and consumers view networks.

Lucent's Inferno network operating system emerged from a self-imposed quiet period with the announcement of a ready-to-license version, and Lucent announced that 20 customers, including several major consumer electronics manufacturers, had already bought licenses.

Then Lucent and Sun decided to stop positioning Inferno and Java as sometime competitors and signed a series of pacts that linked the two software systems, allowing Sun to break Java out of the Internet's confines and giving Lucent a marketing partner that's familiar with the high-tech game.

For carriers, this partnership represents an opportunity to use their networks-voice and data-to deliver new services to customers.

For Sun, Lucent and their carrier customers to capitalize on this, three things have to happen: Suitable information devices must be produced, applications must be created to take advantage of Java and Inferno, and a thoughtful approach must be developed to market these new applications.

The Lucent/Sun team is well into the process of wooing the makers of devices like screen phones, alphanumeric pagers, cellular phones with text displays and set-top boxes, and a walk around the floor of the JavaOne Developers' Conference showed that literally thousands of independent software developers have seized upon the possibilities of Java for the consumer space. With the additional market opened by Inferno, you can expect a tidal wave of new messaging, directory and informational services to arrive within the next few months for platforms other than the desktop.

When these applications arrive, the ball will be in the carrier's court. To avoid squandering the opportunity, carriers will at first need to ease their customers into this new networking environment by focusing on services like voice mail, electronic directories and unified messaging, instead of more esoteric services that customers have as yet expressed no demand for. Carriers will also need to keep an eye on the fast-changing software development world as never before, looking for applications that can gradually expand the reasons consumers pick up their telephone receivers.

Ready or not, convergence is here. Now we'll see how serious our industry is about it.