Sources say an equipment failure in California has taken the company's Southern Cross cable down. No failover has kicked in and Sprint has been thus far been unable to re-route customers. The outage began at 5am on Sunday morning.
ATM and frame relay circuits such as these are leased by large corporations and carriers. Unlike leasing IP connectivity, frame relay and IPL connections operate at a lower level -- customers can run their own protocol over the connection, and don't have to transmit data over public lines.
The company says the fault has not affected its IP-based services, but would not give an indication of when the fault is likely to be fixed. It is "being dealt with as a matter of priority as all matters of this nature are," a spokeswoman told ZDNet Australia .
The spokeswoman would not say how many of Sprint's customers have been affected by the outage.
Industry sources say many of Sprint's local customers are US-based corporations that have opened offices in Australia and have required the extension of their global private networks into Australia.
