CTIA: Sprint launches new business service; offers first mobile data SLA

NEW ORLEANS--Seeking to leverage both its wireless and wireline access, Sprint at CTIA Wireless launched an access management service geared at enterprises and introduced its first wireless data service level agreement.

Sprint's Extended Workplace is intended to bridge Sprint's wireline, CDMA and Wi-Fi assets, giving customers a choice of all the access networks available at any point in time, said Barry Tishgart, senior director of product management for Extended Workplace.

"We're trying to erase that artificial line between wireless and wireline," Tishgart said. "We want to give enterprises the confidence to run their applications over the wireless network."

That line, however, will remain distinct for quite some time. Tishgart said that there is still a perception that wireless is a best-effort technology, to be used only as a last resort. While enterprises are realizing that wireless has a significant role for their businesses among their mobile workers, Tishgart said, they are looking for some degree of quality control, which is what prompted Sprint to launch its first wireless data SLA. Sprint started offering an SLA for voice services last year and is now extending it to data, putting strict guarantees for EV-DO, 1X and Wi-Fi availability and providing credits when those guarantees aren't met.

"We were comfortable enough in 2004 to with our voice service, based on both internal and external metrics, to offer a voice SLA," Tishgart said. "This year we've reached that level of comfort for our data service to offer a data SLA.