OVERLAND PARK, Kan. -- Sprint (NYSE: FON - News, PCS - News) today announced it has begun routing voice and data traffic on the first of several of its major fiber-optic rings throughout the Boston area to enhance communications network reliability and improve monitoring capabilities for its customers.

When additional fiber-optic rings are added this year and next, the Sprint metro network is expected to total nearly 320 route miles in the Boston area. The deployment will position the all-digital, fiber-optic Sprint network closer to thousands of area businesses and consumers, enabling them to benefit from the latest Sprint network characteristics and technologies. These rings will connect the Sprint network to several local telecom exchange points of presence and end offices. In addition, the metro network is expected to eventually connect to Sprint mobile switching centers, which route wireless calls for local PCS customers of Sprint.

This latest achievement is part of the Sprint metro area network (MAN) initiative, which broadens the company's local transport infrastructure into metropolitan areas across the United States. Sprint is driving the full capabilities of its all-digital, fiber-optic network deeper into the metro areas of more than 30 U.S. cities before mid-2004.

"Customers want communications companies to be the guardians of their traffic from end-to-end as much as possible," said Mike Nelson, acting vice president of Access Management at Sprint. "This new Boston metro network will enable Sprint to bring its industry-leading record of reliability and other benefits much closer to its area customers."

The ring architecture being deployed by Sprint in more than 30 major U.S. cities is similar to the nationwide network ring design that Sprint and its customers have benefited from for nearly a decade. With the latest self- healing network technology available on hundreds of rings linked across the country, the Sprint network is able to reroute fiber-optic traffic during primary causes of telecom route failure -- fiber cuts and electronic outages -- in milliseconds. Largely because of this network design, Sprint has led its two major national rivals in reporting the fewest numbers of FCC-reportable long-distance network outages every year since 1996. The FCC requires that carriers report all outages that block at least 90,000 calls during an event that lasts at least 30 minutes.

Sprint Corp.