Competitors dispute Sprint IP claim

Sprint’s announcement this month of a private IP (Internet protocol) network aimed at government users has prompted competitors to dispute the company’s claim that the service will be unique.

Both MCI (formerly WorldCom) and WamNet, a networking firm based in Eagan, Minn., say they’ve been providing private IP network services to government users for years, but Sprint continues to insist its service will be unique in offering a completely private network not connected to the public Internet to U.S. government agencies concerned with security.

Sprint announced April 1 it was planning to launch by late June a private IP network aimed at U.S. government agencies. Sprint spokesman Steve Lunceford said then that the company believed the company’s offering would be the first such service, but since then, both MCI and WamNet have disagreed.

“We were a bit surprised when Sprint was the first to have a high-performance, private IP for the federal space because we’ve been operating in that environment for many years,” said Diana Gowen, MCI’s vice president for government markets. Following Sprint’s announcement, MCI began promoting vBNS on a Web site, vbns.net.

MCI executives said they’ve been providing their very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS), which was developed with the National Science Foundation in 1995, to U.S. government users for about three years. Among the customers of MCI’s vBNS+ service are the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps, Gowen said.

MCI executives touted the security and reliability of vBNS+, saying the U.S. military has high standards for both. “In the evolution of the services we’ve had under the umbrella called vBNS+, as we’ve evolved it and replaced all the switches and routers and connections, this thing has remained available for our customers,” said Charles Lee, regional account manager MCI government markets. “It has not had serious service interruptions; in fact, I can’t recall any service interruptions for any customer during that entire period.”

Over at WamNet, chief architect David Lease said the company has been running an international IP-based network since 1996 and serving government customers including the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service since 1999. For the INS, the company transports X-rays on its network, Lease said, while the company’s main focus in the past has been on networks for the printing industry. The company also has a subcontract for the Navy and Marine Corps intranet, among other U.S. government contracts, Lease said.

“The military has their own set of security requirements and rules they have to play by, and they don’t usually mesh with civilian,” Lease said.

WamNet promotes its service as a “turn-key environment,” with no infrastructure that the customer needs to buy. “We own the lines … we do all the network management,” Lease said. “We do all the ugly work, and the customer gets the benefit.”

Sprint probably didn’t know about WamNet’s services, Lease said. “We try to characterize ourselves something on the order of the man behind the curtain,” he said.

But Sprint spokesman Lunceford said the MCI and WamNet networks are different animals than what his company plans. “We’re talking about a network that has absolutely no connectivity to others whatsoever,” he said. “It’s not a virtual private network, it is a private network.”

Lunceford and Steve Lacoff, Sprint’s senior program officer for IP data services, said both MCI’s and WamNet’s services connect to the public Internet. They noted that WamNet leases some of its lines from Internet backbone providers, and MCI’s service is a VPN (virtual private network). VPNs use public networks while maintaining privacy through security measures and tunneling.

An MCI spokeswoman said vBNS+ customers have the choice of connecting to the public Internet or not, but she confirmed the service is a network-based virtual private network.

Lease, with WamNet, said his company’s service is connected to the public Internet through a double-firewalled gateway. He questioned how many customers would want a totally private network. “If you’re totally unconnected to the Internet, that means you have no connection to the outside world,” he said.

Sprint said computers connected to the company’s new service will also be able to connect to the public Internet through a different service.

On the other hand, Sprint’s network will be a physically separate, private network, the Sprint employees countered. “[MCI’s] vBNS has hooks into the public network,” Lacoff said. “It all depends on what the service provider’s definition of privacy is. The majority of customers may be comfortable with running VPN services on top of a public Internet.”

Most enterprise customers will continue to be happy with VPN services, but an extra assurance of security is a request Sprint is hearing from some U.S. government users, Lacoff said. “You can basically think of this as a large, private Internet,” he added. “This is a premium service from our standpoint.”