(FORTUNE Magazine) – Did you see the news a few weeks ago that Sprint is planning a digital telephone network called ION? Sprint calls it a "transformational enabling platform." Sounds pretty important, huh?

Phone companies love making these grand announcements. And the press loves writing about them. Every newspaper I saw for a week gave Sprint's extensive coverage. For the life of me, despite the information graphics and the sidebars, I couldn't figure out what Sprint was actually doing.

Sprint said it had introduced a network architecture that would allow a single wire to share telephone, fax, and data at a multiple of the speed and a fraction of the cost of existing telephone lines. It said it would be selling this wonder technology to everyone, including simple consumers. As you know by now, I am intensely interested in how I can connect our home, the Digital Manor, to the rest of the world. So I read about ION with more than passing interest.

Apparently, Sprint's network is based on a technology called ATM (asynchronous transfer mode). The network isn't that new, because Sprint started building it several years ago and has already spent $2 billion on the core pieces. (Sprint appears to like betting on technology; it has also spent billions on Sprint PCS, its national digital-cellular-phone network.) Now Sprint is saying it will open ION to home users (as well as businesses) for both telephone and computer networking.

And there is the rub: Just how does the company plan to connect its network directly to users, when it has the same old telephone monopolies standing between it and the customer?

More on that in a moment. First I want to give you a sense of what that phrase "old telephone monopoly" means.

As reported in this column (probably ad nauseam), Digital Manor is my test bed for getting connected to the wired world. I plan to have a cable modem, as soon as Tele-Communications Inc. offers me one; a DSL connection, which Pacific Bell actually recently announced, as soon as it offers me one; a satellite connection, as soon as I figure out how to get the dish installed on my roof. We've set up the wiring in our house to be able to support any kind of connection.

So far, we haven't made it very far into the process, though, because we first had to get past Pacific Bell, our very own old telephone monopoly.

We ordered four POTS (plain old telephone service) lines and one ISDN (integrated services digital network) line from Pacific Bell before we moved into Digital Manor, but we didn't get the chance to find out if they worked until my digital gardener, Dan Seoane, tried to hook everything up. Once we did move in, Dan discovered that two of the POTS lines didn't work. Actually, the physical wires did work, but they were connected to someone else's telephone numbers. Dan could pick up the phone and listen in on other people's conversations. The people at Pacific Bell, however, would not acknowledge that the lines did not work, insisting that they could hear the dial tone and that was sufficient evidence of working lines.

(When you call Pacific Bell, the person who answers the phone asks, "How can we provide you with excellent service today?" He or she then asks you to repeat the phone number you were forced to enter before you talked to the person. This leads to a kind of cynicism when you encounter the kind of service I did. I had one representative from Pacific Bell tell me flatly that I was wrong and that it was my problem. Another time, the person I was talking to said she was just taking messages for customer service and couldn't actually help me.)

I could bore you with more tales of Pacific Bell, but instead I'll just tell you that I did what any red-blooded American would do: pulled strings. Writing a column for FORTUNE has some definite nonfinancial advantages! I managed to get the service problem escalated to a senior technician, who determined that there were not enough wires attached to the telephone pole out front to provide four POTS lines to our house. (He installed something called a DAML, which allows two phone numbers to share one wire, and everything worked.)

I also found out that our house is right in the sweet spot of communications. (Oh, life is good!) It is less than 10,000 feet from a central office (those windowless buildings in every town where the telephone company houses its switches and where all those wires on the poles or underground go). Theoretically that's close enough for us to get any of the new technologies that telephone companies talk about installed at our house.

Anyway, I learned something significant from this experience: Everything depends on wires! You can't connect two computers or two people unless there are enough wires in between. Our problem was that Pacific Bell has been selling phone lines aggressively for the past several years. It has been running ads and marketing hard to get people to install second or third telephone lines in their houses. It has been selling so hard that in our neighborhood, you can't add another phone line until someone else moves or gives up a line that they already have. Indeed, if our tech hadn't installed that DAML, he would have had to run a strand of wire to a pole three blocks away to connect us to an unused wire.

So here comes Sprint, promising me the world. With a single copper wire, we can get as many simultaneous voice and fax calls as we want as well as very high speed Internet access and even videoconferencing. The cost of individual phone calls will drop to a small percentage--between 10% and 30%--of what we pay now. Sprint hasn't priced its residential service yet, but the newspapers speculate that the device that will be attached to your home and that will make this nirvana possible will cost about $200. Presumably, Sprint will need to install a device that costs about the same in the phone company's central office to complete the connection. (Apparently Cisco has agreed to design these magic boxes but can't promise delivery until late 1999.)

Right now, we spend $50 a month for those four telephone lines (not including the cost of local or long-distance calls), another $35 a month for our ISDN line, and $40 a month for an ISDN connection to the Internet from Earthlink. That's $125 a month Sprint says we won't need to spend anymore. Now presumably Sprint will want to charge us a fee for this wonder service, both for the convenience and to cover the cost of the $200 home device. And presumably it'll find some way to cover the cost of operating the ION network. And presumably it'll find a way to make a profit, even if it charges just $50 a month. Sprint says all this will be possible, since the cost of making phone calls will be a fraction of what it is now.

This ION thing is beginning to sound like a really good deal. So why am I having a hard time believing that Sprint will be able to both deliver this magic box and get past Pacific Bell's fundamental incompetence? Am I just a cynic?

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. Alsop may be reached at stewart_alsop@fortunemail.com