Carrier checkup, California firm tests ISP performance

Inverse Networks is calling Internet service providers-and calling them and calling them-about 125,000 times a month in fact. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based performance measurement company is working up profiles on 17 of the nation's largest ISPs based on factors such as initial pickup time, busy and no answer signals, modem connection success, bit rates, and length of time to log on and download Web pages.

Recent tests reveal what many people already suspected. America Online, for instance, had a 60% call failure rate during peak hours. Comparatively, CompuServe had a 6.5% failure rate, while AT&T and MCI were nearly equal at 18.1% and 18.3% failure rates during peak time, respectively.

However, the industry averages for both peak time and 24-hour fail rates has maintained a fairly steady course since November. Monthly failure rates during peak times ranged from 12% to 22%, and monthly failure rates for 24-hour periods ranged only from 9% to 13%. AOL was only factored into the average beginning in March.

Most of the problems for the ISP connection failures can be attributed to either busy tone or no answer/all circuits busy responses. Within AOL's 60% peak hour fail rate, 52.4% resulted from busy lines. For most ISPs, once the user gets a response, both modem connection failures and log-in failures have low percentages. The problem seems to point to not enough modems, as opposed to poor networks.

Inverse conducts its tests from its Santa Clara office, and to avoid interference with potential local switch problems and truly test what results a local user would get, the company uses local access numbers.

To double check any California-related problems, the company gets detailed switch reports from both Pacific Bell and AT&T to rule out any network problems between the original site and the test city.

Despite the local exchange carriers' widely-reported "jamming" of voice switches because of Internet traffic, Inverse has seen none.

"We use absolutely standard lines at this end," said Michael Watters, Inverse chief executive officer and company co-founder. "Silicon Valley has been claimed as one of those problem areas, but in the year we've been doing this, we have not experienced any blockage with PacBell or AT&T.

Until now, Inverse's primary customers have been large ISPs and some corporations that use the measurements for marketing, benchmarking against competitors and sniffing out operational problems. However, Inverse has started to produce reports aimed at businesses that want to evaluate and compare the quality of the major ISPs.

The ISP Performance Profile provides hard data so managers can make decisions about outsourcing dial-up infrastructures, which ISP may be best to handle extended intranets, and whether to choose a new ISP or hold the existing one accountable, Watters said.

Jennifer Bestor, vice president of marketing for Inverse, finds it interesting that the RHCs and other telcos new to offering Internet service tend to focus on performance when using the reports. "They want to take the telco level of service and bring it to the Internet," she said.

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