Sprint is building new Points of Presence (PoPs) in the nation’s largest carrier hotels, enabling the service provider to achieve two key goals: expanding its network and providing additional access.
The first location Sprint has built out to is One Summer Street in Boston, which is New England’s largest multitenant, telecom and data-center facility serving more than 200 tenants.
By establishing a PoP at the One Summer Street location, Sprint can now provide access to Global MPLS and Dedicate IP customers via a direct presence.
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The new PoP provides One Summer Street’s carrier and enterprise customers access to port speed up to 100 Gbps second.
Mike Fitz, president and general manager of the Sprint Global Wireline Business Unit, said in a release that One Summer Street was a key target.
“Sprint is aggressively expanding our network,” Fitz said. “Deploying in a major carrier hotel like One Summer allows us to provide access to our global all-IP network to a significant number of customers.”
IP network expansion
Establishing a presence in major carrier hotels in the U.S. is part of a broader effort by the service provider to expand its IP network footprint.
Customers will now be able to more readily access the service provider’s portfolio of connectivity, cloud networking solutions and emerging value-added services, including SD-WAN.
SD-WAN has become a cornerstone of Sprint’s reemergence in the wireline business segment.
Following initial trial with business customers in late 2016, Sprint launched its SD-WAN service in May. By taking an access agnostic approach, Sprint will leverage and extend the broadband and Ethernet partner capabilities it has developed to provide connectivity.
Since most of its existing and new customers may still have MPLS contracts, Sprint will enable business customers to either replace their current connections with SD-WAN or run hybrid networks.
But the data center buildout effort is only one part of a multi-pronged strategy to enhance its wireline network service availability to more customers.
To support the growing shift from legacy data networks to an all-IP environment, Sprint also added 52 U.S. IP/MPLS nodes in 2016, and in 2017, will add more than 70 nodes, expanding to more than 220 U.S. IP/MPLS nodes.
Enhancing Ethernet
Sprint has built hundreds of E-NNI agreements with over 50 ILEC and cable providers, creating an Ethernet access footprint that blankets the United States.
While Sprint does not publicly report its Ethernet revenues, the service provider’s efforts appear to be paying off.
Sprint obtained a spot in the Challenge Tier of Vertical Systems Group’s mid-year 2017 Ethernet Leaderboard. The Challenge Tier includes providers with between 1% and 4% share of the U.S. retail Ethernet market.