Embarq builds tech center of its own

One of the last remaining vestiges of its Sprint heritage was washed away in April as Embarq cut the ribbon on a new laboratory and technology center at the New Century AirCenter near Gardner, Kan.

Twenty miles southwest of downtown Kansas City, Mo.-near a 7300-foot runway where vendors can land their equipment for a check by Embarq engineers-the Embarq Technology Center opened with a snip of the scissors and a tip of the hat to two former and recently deceased long-time lab employees, Bob Pohlabel and Pete Gaughan.

“They are remembered for their years of service, but they were also top employees who set our standards for what we put in the network,” said Denny Petrie, director of network solutions development for Embarq.

The multimillion dollar lab will focus on interoperability testing for new technologies to support a vision of converged next-generation services. Embarq is adding approximately 14,000 square feet of lab space to the 438,000 square-foot Embarq Logistics facility currently occupying the land. Embarq Logistics also has a 390,000 square-foot warehouse on the property.

The Embarq Technology Center will test not only what goes into the 18-state network, but also ways of getting more value out of it, Petrie said.

The facility will focus on testing equipment and application interoperability as well as interoperability with back-office systems. It also will test customer premises equipment that Embarq's business customers install in their networks, particularly its business customers' equipment.

Petrie said when Embarq planned its separation from Sprint Nextel, it knew it had to extend lab environment capabilities. “The new center has access to the outside public network and is no longer an isolated test environment,” he said. “We can put a new service in the lab and roll it out to a subset of our customers and make better use of market trials. That would have been unheard of in the old lab days.”

The lab will help Embarq refine and improve its network performance by pretesting network technology in more real-world environments. Bill Blessing, senior vice president of strategy for Embarq, said ILECs must embrace concepts such as Web 2.0 and learn to compete on an accelerated cycle of product introduction.

As the company approaches its first anniversary since spinning off from Sprint Nextel, it has begun to stem the tide of access line loss and can turn its attention to using the lab to take inefficiency out of the network.

Along with solid first quarter earnings of $1.59 billion in net operating revenue, Embarq reported 15,000 fewer access lines lost than in the previous quarter, making it the second quarter in a row the company saw an improvement in access line losses. At the same time, the company added 87,000 high-speed Internet subscribers, a company record.

Dan Hesse, chairman and CEO of Embarq, said that with an improving access line trend and strong growth in data, high-speed Internet and wireless revenues, the company is off to a great start in 2007. Still, it lost 71,000 lines in the quarter and has far to go before reversing the trends. As part of the process of introducing services, the lab could help.

Two of Embarq's growth areas are in the business community and with wireless customers-often one in the same. With 23,000 new wireless subscribers in the quarter — now totaling almost exactly what Embarq lost in landline subscribers — the lab can have an impact on bringing the company's Smart Connect solution further along.

Smart Connect is one of the more progressive converged services available, allowing business customers to use one number for wireless and wireline calls. Calls ring on both devices and can be transferred between either technology.

The Sprint Applied Research and Advanced Technology Lab conducted much of the early work on fixed/mobile convergence and launched the Sprint Wireless Integration service for business customers in December 2006.

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