Jockeying for position

The quest for local loop access intensified last week as carriers and vendors called for uncorking infrastructure bottlenecks, ensuring that interconnection agreements are market-driven and in the long term, tracking Internet traffic with packet-by-packet precision.

The bottom line: Bell companies must recognize that their local access edge is coming under ever greater threat as competitors seek their own routes to the end user. And the end user should beware that the Internet is attracting ever greater numbers of big business, and with it the desire to create and charge for stratified tiers of service.

The Internet is now recognized as a fourth channel in which companies do business, and reports abound that Internet commerce will continue to skyrocket. The Forrester Report pegs that growth from $8 billion to $27 billion in goods and services traded among companies by 2002.

The Global Internet Project, a group of 13 companies seeking to ensure the growth of e-commerce, is focusing on six areas: infrastructure, governance, security, privacy, content and commerce. The infrastructure issues include:

* Open interfaces and interconnection to the local loop on what it called reasonable terms to encourage new entrants to offer high-speed access technologies such as digital subscriber line.

* Open, published interfaces for all layers of software to encourage product development.

* Interconnection among backbone network providers based on market-driven terms, as well as market-driven grades of service.

* Increased investments in server infrastructure, including caching and mirroring, to manage growing bandwidth demands and better serve users.

The Global Internet Project, which is calling for a summit later this year, issued its recommendations at the World Congress on Information Technology in Fairfax, Va. Its primary aims are to manage the growth of the Internet and keep it self-regulated and driven by private-sector initiatives.

Although its ideals are sound, its members-including MCI, GTE Interworking, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Netscape, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Cisco and AT&T-are not without their own agendas.

Of course, AT&T's proposed $37 billion buy of Tele-Communications Inc. sounds the biggest alarm yet that the IXC is aiming to regain its local access, this time with cable lines (see story on page 6).

And the other IXCs and Microsoft competitors in the Global Internet Project have great stakes in keeping the Internet and its software standards open.

Yet John Patrick, the project chairman, and Dan Schulman, president of AT&T WorldNet Service, speak urgently about the group's aim being simple rather than starry-eyed. It wants to address critical issues that may hinder the Internet's growth before a crisis arises. The group also realizes that businesses will always have proprietary interests, but that doesn't have to stymie open interfaces and interconnection.

Patrick, vice president of Internet technology at IBM, believes some of today's access bottlenecks will be resolved with Internet2, a separate Internet infrastructure designed to connect research and educational institutions. Internet2 will feature gigapops, which he believes could eliminate peering agreements.

Internet2 also promises to differentiate packets to unheard-of quality-of-service levels-to the point where a packet that's part of an e-mail message can be picked apart from a packet that's part of a voice conversation, for example.

That level of sophistication is a glimmer in Sprint's eye. Largely overlooked in its announcement of a new asynchronous transfer mode-based network, the Integrated On-Demand Network, is a proposal to enable businesses to bill their customers by the megacell, or data bit. The plan could change the billing paradigm from minute-based to individual ATM cell-based.

It's only fair to note that the Bell companies aren't exactly sitting on their hands-their Internet and e-commerce plans make news just about every week. Last week was no exception, as U S West announced it will use VeriSign OnSite, a certificate authority software solution, to enable its corporate customers to access product, billing and service information over the Internet in real time (see story on page 14).

Now it's up to the service providers to develop either their own or a common strategy to give end users a unique, and not uniquely dreadful, Internet experience.