It plans to begin offering commercial ION services to selected corporations by midyear, officials said during interviews with PC Week at the company's headquarters here last week. With ION promising connection speeds from 1.5M bps to 45M bps and beyond, Sprint is creating a stable of networked applications to take advantage of the higher bandwidth. But it is a bit of uncharted water.
Large customers seem ready to set sail.
The potential of the bandwidth is very attractive. Sysco delayed deployment of the ION services while it relocated one of its offices but is now ready to begin testing, Hardin said. To that end, Sprint plans to launch over the next six weeks a high-speed desktop videoconferencing service, officials said. The company currently is beta testing PictureTel Corp.'s 384K-bps videoconferencing software, but the new service will perform at speeds beyond 384K bps, officials said. Sprint is also planning a hosted e-mail service and has narrowed down its choice of a partner to Microsoft Corp., with Exchange, or Lotus Development Corp., with Notes, officials said.