• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Sprint to Sell Its Own Local Phone Service in Kansas City, Mo., Area

Posted on: Tuesday, 9 December 2003, 06:00 CST

Dec. 10--Sprint Corp. no longer has to buy local phone service for its Overland Park campus from a rival, SBC Communications.

Beginning today, Sprint will be selling its own local phone service to large businesses in the Kansas City area. That includes Sprint's own headquarters.

The company, whose local phone network is limited to certain parts of the country, already sells local service to large businesses in St. Louis and five other cities outside its local territories.

Harry Campbell, president of mass markets, said Sprint planned to expand that strategy into additional markets. He said the company had found the most interest from companies with between 500 and 1,000 employees.

"If you're a business, you have the opportunity to get all your telecommunications needs from Sprint," Campbell said. "That would include local, long-distance, calling features, high-speed data and wireless services."

Sprint has also been pushing hard to sell bundles of services to consumers and small-business customers with fewer than four phone lines.

With those smaller customers, Sprint buys wholesale access to a local phone carrier's network. But with larger businesses, Sprint is using its own telephone switching equipment in nearby local service markets.

The "edge-out" strategy, which began just over a year ago in Columbus, Ohio, involves linking a metropolitan area to a nearby city or town where Sprint is the local phone company. The company will link its Kansas City customers to its telephone switch in Gardner.

"We really believe that the idea of purchasing multiple services from a single company is not only what customers want, but it's clearly the way the market is moving," Campbell said. "Therefore, what we want to do is continue to broaden our portfolio where we can do that."

-----

To see more of The Kansas City Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.kansascity.com.

(c) 2003, The Kansas City Star, Mo. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

FON, SBC,

More News in this Category