You may have experienced a drastic delay in delivery of an email message, particularly if the packet was processed during an exceptionally busy time of day. Routing technologies are emerging to ease these Internet traffic jams, but the solutions thus far have only been offered on an experimental, regional basis.
But now, armed with a US$20 million infusion of venture-capital cash, InterNAP Network Services plans to take its service global. Within the next three years, InterNAP plans to roll out new routing points in 35 to 40 major metro markets internationally to create dozens of private network access nodes all over the world for customers like Microsoft, Adobe, and others that cannot tolerate delays in critical email deliveries. The first markets to receive the technology - InterNAP's Private Network Access Point software, combined with its routing technology - are San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Atlanta.
"The P-NAPs are being designed to effectively and optimally broker the connectivity between all things local and all things global," says InterNAP CEO Tony Naughtin. "They are extensively multi-homed, not just into two or three upstream backbones, like a local ISP would do, but actually to the eight major backbones simultaneously. That gives us the ability to connect to the networks that comprise 90 percent of the global routes on the network."
The advanced application of the so-called Border Gateway Protocol routes messages symmetrically over the Net. This eliminates the need for packets of data to travel through the MAE East and MAE West access points and other "severe choke points" on the network, where packets of data can disappear, Naughtin says. Private Network Access Point will peer directly with MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and other telcos that will route messages straight to their network destination without having to link to the MAE points. Switching is no longer going to be done randomly, as it is now, and that will virtually eliminate the congestion that often delays message delivery, Naughtin says.
A small-scale version of the InterNAP technology has been in use in the company's hometown of Seattle since last October, and now it is readying for a national rollout. InterNAP has also applied for a patent on the technology in recent weeks. One interesting thing about the development of this technology: For years, Internet gurus have been saying that the Web would "disintermediate" transactions. But now, it appears that an intermediary is needed to make Internet transactions proceed smoothly. Some in the Internet industry, though, are skeptical about the promises of faster, more reliable message delivery.
"I would like to see statistics on how effective this actually is," says Sarah O'Donnell, a senior project manager at extranet developer Click Interactive, an extranet developer whose clients include Ameritech and Motorola. "My initial reaction to it is somewhat skeptical. But, on the other hand, if it does what it says it does, it would be quite helpful."
But Eric Zimits, a research analyst at San Francisco's Hambrecht & Quist, says that his company has invested in this firm because there is burgeoning demand for this kind of service. There will be a stratification of network service, based on the customer's ability to pay for access. "If you can carve out the public Internet in some way that it becomes a viable medium for commercial mission-critical applications, you can provide a better quality of service than just dumping data packets out there and hoping they wind up at the point you wanted them to," Zimits says. "That's what this technology does."
