Fergie's Tech Blog

Bidders Abound for Sprint Pseudowire RFP

Carmen Nobel writes on Light Reading:

While the Sprint Nextel Corp. RFP for pseudowire indicates that the company is still in the nascent stages of consideration, several suitors have jumped on board to bid. In the meantime, the company has been lobbying the U.S. Congress to regulate backhaul access fees.

A copy of the 10-page request for proposal, obtained by Light Reading, is vague on the timing or scope of a possible pseudowire deployment. But it does spell out how the company intends to use the technology -- both for wired and wireless services.

Pseudowires allow carriers to carve up bandwidth into small, packetized virtual channels, helping reduce the need for additional T1 lines to backhaul traffic from cell sites to the network backbone -- lines that wireless carriers often have to lease from incumbent wireline carriers.

posted by Fergie @ 6/15/2006 02:17:00 PM