A lucrative inner sanctum

With Internet service providers gearing for wholesale user growth, it's easy to overlook what's happening in the some of the information superhighway's potentially lucrative private clubs.

This issue of Internet Edge highlights the opportunities available to those with the keys to these clubs, and it finds that extranets are, though few and far between, a fast-growing trend. Telcos already are partnering with ISPs and finding new clients for their access pipes.

Yet a few hurdles await. Contenders for data traffic promise to be fierce, from inside and outside the telco industry. As the issue's cover story points out, a research group found that a paltry 1% of the executives responding to a recent survey picked a telco as a potential intranet/extranet partner. The first choice was a consulting firm; the second was an ISP.

Image problems are nothing new, however, and telcos have shown that they can turn them into opportunities.

One such opportunity is Internet fax traffic, which now runs primarily over private intranets-not the Internet. As the article explains, that market is projected to skyrocket from 44 million fax pages rerouted from the public switched network last year to 5.6 billion in 2000.

Another market that's moving traffic away from traditional carriers consists of hotels, apartments and high-rises. ISPs are reaping the benefits of providing Internet access to these customers, who've shown they're willing to pay for high-end services.

Even fun and games are getting serious. Sports-related Web sites have become some of the hottest stops on the Internet, and carriers must be ready to support the traffic. They are counting on a profit, although none has emerged so far.

And finally, this issue's guest columnist, Milo Medin of @Home, makes a powerful argument that ATM will fade in importance when wavelength division multiplexing takes off.

Although infrastructure technology patterns of deployment still stoke fiery debate for some, ensuring backbone capacity for the Internet is only one of the issues telcos need to worry about at this point. More significantly, a variety of business opportunities are ready to move ahead-extranets, IP faxing and sports sites are but a few examples-and they likely will move ahead whether telcos support them or not.