Sprint Has Fewest Outages

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Business and residential communication consumers with network reliability and corporate integrity on their wish list this holiday season need look no further than Sprint (NYSE: FON, PCS) for fulfillment. Sprint is once again poised to lead the industry with the fewest Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reportable long distance network outages for 2002. According to FCC records, Sprint has had only two reportable long distance network outages so far this year (through Nov. 15), compared with five and 15 by its two primary long distance service rivals. If these trends hold up, it will be the seventh consecutive year that Sprint has had the fewest FCC reportable long distance outages. A primary reason behind Sprint’s success in restoring communications traffic so efficiently has been its deployment of SONET technology in survivable rings. A break in a SONET ring triggers voice and other SONET-based traffic to reverse direction in milliseconds to reach its intended destination. “Not only are our SONET-based services leading the industry, but our IP-based services are also designed to keep our customers data on track,” added Flessas. “Sprint’s IP backbone is designed to protect against failure at the IP layer, splitting the traffic load across multiple links for unsurpassed reliability. As an example, our survivability in the IP arena was demonstrated last year with the Baltimore tunnel fire. That incident, which knocked out traffic on our competitors’ networks, wasn’t even a blip on our radar screen.” Sprint Corp.