Sprint VP says IP is happening now

Surrounded by the alternately futuristic and pessimistic views of pulver.com’s Voice on the Net [VON] Conference, Fred Harris, vice president of design, applications and services for Sprint, was upbeat about the opportunity for voice over IP to succeed.

“Like any revolution, it takes time to get through it,” Harris said. “The revolution is well under way. This technology is going to dynamically and very significantly change the environment.”

But it will only happen when all the kinks are worked out.

“Here we are in the midst of a conference that specializes in voice on the ‘net and you go around, and you cannot find a single vendor here that can deliver primary line Class 5 softswitch capability,” Harris said. “We [Sprint] have it today [through technology developed by Telcordia]. Nobody else can do that, but we’ve been doing it for 15 months.”

Sprint is using the softswitches on its integrated on-demand network [ION], Harris said.

“Sprint has spent the last 2½ years developing ION. Nobody else in the industry is even close to what we’ve been doing,” he said. “We are rolling out, and have rolled out, an enormous amount of software that is operational support systems, business operations systems, so at the end of the day, we have the environment to create converged services into bundling that cannot be matched in the industry.”

Sprint is implementing the disruptive policy advocated by many VoIP supporters as a way to overthrow the existing telephone infrastructure.

“You bundle it in such a way that the ILEC can’t compete with it other than to slash prices,” Harris said. “If I can get the RBOCs to react to what I’m doing, I take their eye off what it is that they need to do. If you respond to a competitive threat, you’ll always be behind it.”

This can work for others in the VoIP space, though it might take a little more time and money, and it probably won’t be done by the cable industry, , Harris said.

“I’m not sure it’s [cable] a terrible threat either,” he said. “We have at least a little learning that’s been done on this.”

Sprint also has a little technology.

“It’s our DSL, it’s our services hub, it’s our DSLAM, it’s our connection back to our hub,” he boasted.

And, for Sprint, it’s “real profits [and] real customers who pay money for this service,” he concluded.