Sprint on Monday announced that it's rolling out a new video conferencing service using equipment from Polycom in Milpitas, Calif., and networking technology from Ridgeway Communications in Reading, England.
The new service will also rely on Sprint's own backbone, the company said.
According to Sprint, what distinguishes its service and system from those offered by Tier-1 service providers such as AT&T and WorldCom is the ability to provide business-grade video conferencing among multiple users over Internet protocol networks. The service will be available immediately for $30 per hour per video connection, said a spokeswoman for Kansas City-based Sprint. A video connection, or single port, could be a conference room video conferencing system or single camera on a desktop computer.
Sprint will use a packet management technology from Ridgeway that smooths the movement of video and audio packets through corporate firewalls and network address translation (NAT) devices without compromising network security.
NAT allows a company to use thousands of private addresses in its local area networks, but it must present those addresses to the Internet through a single public Internet address. While the latter helps mask devices on the corporate network from public networks, a Ridgeway spokesman said NATs and firewalls make it difficult to maintain a persistent and high-quality video conferencing session using IP.
It's a problem that the Ridgeway system solves, the spokesman said.
As part of the new service, Sprint will resell Polycom's video conferencing equipment, which starts at $599 for a single-camera system that connects to the USB port on a PC.
"Sprint is the first major service provider to announce an IP video conferencing program," said Andrew Davis, an analyst at Wainhouse Research in Brookline, Mass. He noted that although there's been interest in video over IP by users and by video equipment vendors, "until now, the service provider has been missing."
AT&T and WorldCom didn't immediately comment on the Sprint move. But Davis said, "I believe before the year is over we'll see one or both of those players jump in."
