Dec 22, 1997 12:00 PM,

The Internet express lane

Michael Gaddis

Less than 10 years ago, Michael Gaddis was serving as a Marine Corps officer. Today, under Gaddis' leadership, Savvis Communications has established a beachhead for itself in the quickly shifting Internet market, moving in less than two years from being a regional ISP to a national carrier delivering high-quality Internet services for the corporate market.

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"We saw that, as the use of the Internet grew, problems with service and performance were going to become more acute and that there was going to be a market for reliable service among large corporate users, content providers and other local and regional ISPs," says Gaddis, executive vice president and chief technical officer of the St. Louis-based ISP.

To address that need, Savvis has built its own fully redundant national network of network access points (NAPs) in 17 cities across the country, enabling it to ensure "carrier-class Internet access" to its customers. The company has targeted 24 other cities for future expansion of the network.

Several of Savvis' sites are private NAPs with direct connections to the backbones of MCI, Sprint and UUNet. Savvis augments its network with private pairing agreements with these carriers and uses local loop technology to bind its redundant networks. "It's more expensive than traditional approaches, but you have control of your bandwidth," says Gaddis.

The entire Savvis network is built around asynchronous transfer mode switching, which Gaddis knows intimately from his time at Washington University, where he helped develop the first commercial ATM switch for Bay Networks.

"It all boils down to [supporting] the flow of data through a switch and maintain acceptable levels of loss, latency and throughput," says Gaddis.

By building robust, economical networks, providers such as Savvis will find a massive audience in a wide variety of vertical markets, he says.

"Private networks can be replaced by the Internet if providers can guarantee quality-of-service levels," Gaddis says. "We think we know how to do it."