Bank of America's Tech Boost

The financial group is making a huge investment in tomorrow, expanding its network by a factor of 16 and buying up colocation space for future customer services.

by Jim Wagner of internetnews.com [October 17, 2002]

Bank of America has signed a 10-year deal with Sprint that basically revamps the financial organization's entire network, which until today used OC-3 pipes to connect banking subsidiaries located throughout the U.S.

According to David Gunasegaram, a Sprint spokesperson, the deal is more than just a typical network upgrade.

"This is a brand new network they're buying into," he said.

Bank of America is leasing 27 OC-48 lines throughout the U.S. and is colocating at Sprint's 13 data centers, which means the company will be able to put in equipment (i.e., servers) to speed delivery of customer services to its 28 million customers.

The company has more than 4,400 banking centers, call centers and data-processing facilities throughout the country, as well as 12,000 ATMs. While officials will expand other services with their new network, they've got immediate plans to provide color and sound to ATMs.

"Our commitment to continually offer our customers the most innovative products and services to meet all of their financial needs—like talking ATMs and digital check imaging—places larger demands on our communications network," said Don Obert, Bank of America technology services executive, in a statement today.

Sprint uses dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical technology to boost the performance of its nationwide network. Called "lightwave services" by its executives, the technology enhanced by Sprint's Advanced Technology Laboratories technicians can boost OC-48 network speeds to around 400 Gbps.

DWDM is protocol and bit-rate independent, so carriers can sell to companies who use any number of network architectures, including IP, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), synchronous optical network (SONET), and Ethernet.

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