Sprint IONizes Lucent

(Telephony) Halfway through a two-year contract, Lucent made public today its $129 million agreement with Sprint to deploy Lucent’s Stinger DSL platform in the Sprint ION network.

Highlighting the announcement was the incorporation of private network-to-network (PNNI) capabilities to the platform, which extend automatic route provisioning and re-routing of traffic during periods of congestion or network failure to ATM-based networks.

"Sprint insisted we build this capability because the value of the services they are putting across the network is so great they felt they needed that added level of security," said Chris Poer, product manager for Lucent’s Stinger platform.

Lucent already has deployed its Stinger platform in Sprint locations across the country and will add PNNI as a feature release. PNNI is now generally available to all users of Lucent’s Stinger product.

Lucent’s new software will improve the provisioning functionality that is resident on the Stinger platform. "It now provides end-to-end provisioning from the DSLAM to the terminating device. Prior to PNNI you had to do manual cross-connects across the network," Poer said.