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Sprint's Self-Healing Fiber-Optic
Technology 11/16/94 CHICAGO,
ILLINOIS, U.S.A., 1994 NOV 16 (NB) --
Sprint (NYSE: FON) executives took an
ax to one of the firm's fiber-optic
cables this week, to show off what
the firm billed as "a new standard of
telecommunications survivability."
That mouthful actually means lost
connections can be reestablished
immediately, instead of in minutes or
hours, when a cable gets cut or an
equipment failure.
The demonstration took place in
Chicago, where the technology is in
place, and worked as advertised. A
video signal displayed on a TV
monitor showed only a brief flicker
when the cable was severed.
Sprint spokesperson Jim Bowman
told Newsbytes, "We told people,
don't watch the ax, watch the
monitor. When the ax came down, three
little horizontal lines crossed the
picture. If you blinked, you missed
it."
He added that, though Sprint only
claims a system will self-heal in 60
milliseconds, an oscilloscope
measuring the event showed the signal
was fully restored in only 8
milliseconds.
"I don't think 'amaze' is too big
a word," commented Bowman. "We had
some senior people from NEC there,
and one of them pointed out to me
afterward that we had repaired the
network in a shorter time than it
takes the Sprint pin to drop."
Sprint has long used the image of
a dropping pin on its TV ads, to
suggest the quietness and fidelity of
a fiber-optic connection.
Bowman said Sprint's entire
system will use the new "self-
healing" technology by mid-1996. The
result, says the communications firm,
will be "unprecedented reliability
for voice, video and data
communications."
The technology is based on SONET,
for "synchronous optical network," a
technology which Sprint began
installing on its backbone network
late last year. SONET improves
transport capacity, while the firm's
four-fiber, bidirectional, line-
switched ring architecture allows the
rapid self-healing, the firm says.
Sprint says the self-healing
following an interruption will go
unnoticed on voice calls. Video
transmissions will experience a very
brief flicker without loss of picture
and data transmissions, said the
firm.
To accomplish continuous service
when a signal is lost, traffic is
rerouted through the SONET ring. The
Chicago installation is the first of
39 SONET rings Sprint plans to bring
on-line in the US.
Sprint claims other networks
cannot self-heal nearly as quickly,
because they use a linear
architecture, rather than the ring
architecture used by Sprint. If
traffic between point A and point B
is disrupted on a linear system,
service must be suspended until
network managers reroute the traffic
or the cable is physically repaired.
Either approach can take hours, says
Sprint.
Kevin Brauer, president of
Sprint's business services group,
said Sprint created the self-healing
technology for customers running
broadband, mission-critical
applications over distributed
systems, but Bowman added: "This will
not be a premium service. It'll just
be what you get when you get Sprint
service."
(Craig Menefee/19941116/Press
Contact: Jim Bowman, 913-967-3675, or
Norman Black, 404-859-6096, both of
Sprint)