Sprint's Internet: 'FastBreak'

I'll admit it, I'm a basketball nut. As a born-and-bred New Englander, this time of year I think back to the days when it was a slam dunk that my Celtics, with their kelly green jerseys and parquet floor, would be in the playoffs. And then I wonder what happened this year.

That's my only excuse for the fact that when I first heard about Sprint's "FastBreak," my first thought (embarrassingly) was that the company was buying a basketball team-or something like that.

Well, my in-the-know telco friends gently set me straight and let me in on the high points of Sprint's "revolutionary" network.

What Sprint code-named "FastBreak" now has a more down-to-earth telco title: Integrated On-Demand Network, or ION.

At first blush, details of ION's asynchronous transfer mode-based network, souped up with Sonet rings and capable of handling voice, data, fax and video, didn't strike me as all that revolutionary. Those kinds of things have become no more than slogans for best practices, bumper stickers that carriers paste on when traveling the information superhighway.

Certainly there has to be more to ION than that. Well, there is. To me, it is less about high-speed hardware and heavy lifting of super backbones. It's really about the birth of networks smart enough to do really smart things with all the bandwidth they're already putting in place.

Buried deep in Sprint's announced plans, you'll find that the company wants to work with Cisco Systems-not just for routers and switches, but for some very savvy software, including some that can turn most any piece of network backbone into a directory-enabled network (DEN).

Believe me, this is where the action is-on two counts.

First, we'll have voice-over-ATM capabilities that will help Sprint connect to traditional circuit-switched networks-both for carriers and even multisite corporations using leased lines.

Second comes DEN, which gives the Internet one of the true missing links in the pursuit of high-quality, end-to-end communications.

While it is still being fleshed out as a mature technology, the idea behind DEN is to provide a scalable and intelligent directory service.

This directory will be a real-time database that can help carrier networks figure out the particular services ascribed to each customer and the priorities (for service handling and connection) they require.

Populated with this detailed data, the smart directory might then be able to give huge Internet backbones marvelous abilities, optimizing bandwidth use, enabling policy-based management and providing a single point of administration of all network resources-both carriers' and customers'. This adds up to lower ownership costs, less expensive investment and improved and more reliable service levels.

Here's a more technical "how" look at DEN, courtesy of a white paper from Cisco (and its DEN affiliates).

"Certain users may be authorized to use the network for videoconferencing, so they need secure conference paths to be established automatically, no matter where they may log onto the network. This requires a common data store for the tools used to authenticate and authorize applications and services for the user as well as the network provisioning software. In this example, the common data store is the directory and its networking extensions."

Translation: DEN will help carriers better allocate bandwidth on an as-needed basis and still meet a customer's need for a consistent and even guaranteed quality of service. If it works, that is. Truth be told, DEN is not quite ready to be called an off-the-shelf technology, but it does have the aggressive backing of Cisco, Microsoft and some 50 (and counting) other networking and computer firms.

In any event, Sprint is betting a lot (maybe even the company) on the fact that DEN will work. But Sprint, through trials and testing over the coming year or two, will also push the envelope on this emerging directory technology. The result, even if success is only half of what is promised today, will likely be that more carriers and Internet companies will start investing in a new breed of QOS technologies-and not just bigger pipes.

Will DEN work? Has Sprint bet too much on something too new? I don't know. But they sure have taken the Internet game up a notch.

And, with so much riding on the outcome, it's gonna be exciting to watch. Like, maybe, Game 7 of an NBA Final back when Larry Bird still wore kelly green.