NAP time's over

Much of today's Internet news concerns speed: swift new cable modems and digital subscriber line connections, the spread of OC-12 and OC-48 in data backbones, lab tests of terabit and gigabit routers, and the speed at which commerce and consumers are moving onto the Web.

But these efforts are for naught, according to InterNAP, an Internet connectivity company, because the Internet stumbles badly at the peering points-exchange points where the major backbones meet to hand off transmissions and pick up the traffic carried by others and headed for them.

"You can have an OC-12 backbone and still be stuffing packets into a 100 Mb/s peering point," said InterNAP CEO Tony Naughtin. "Big pipes are not the solution. Better routing technology won't answer, either. If 80% of your traffic goes through four peering points, why put up 20 routers?"

Approximately 70% of all data transmissions, from Web sites to end users, pass through public network access points (NAPs) at peak hours, resulting in packet loss of 10% to 40%, said Naughtin.

These hand-off points are choking today's Internet, and it is here that InterNAP's technology can help.

The company has contracts with what Naughtin terms "backbones of significance"-Tier 1 carriers who each carry 1% or more of total Internet traffic and together transport 95% of it. InterNAP links to each of them and to all their addressees with private NAP sites in seven U.S. cities. At each private NAP, a proprietary Linux/Unix-based aggregator transmits data to and from Internet destinations by seeking the highest performance options available. InterNAP sells connectivity to its private NAPs at prices from $6000 to $60,000 a month, depending on bandwidth desired.

"InterNAP acts like a traffic cop," Naughtin said. "Packets are multi-homed to all the major backbones and stay on a single outbound backbone, with the result that they go through fewer hops and see lower latency."

The edge this system has over private peering is hard cash. "Our model works because we pay these network providers," Naughtin said. "With switched voice, traffic exchange was not a problem because there was a system of economic settlement in place. On the Internet, as long as long-haul capacity is precious, publicly peered traffic will always have a low priority for carriers. Traffic from non-paying peers is the first to fall on the floor."

InterNAP pays its providers the higher of the inbound and outbound charges, not the sum of both. So, the company's tactic is to find a rough balance of inbound and outbound traffic that will create the greatest efficiency in its infrastructure.

InterNAP already has landed some big customers, including six of the 10 largest on-line brokerage houses, allowing them to carry about 15% of all on-line trading. The company has sold transport on its private NAPs to Amazon.com, eBay and Go2Net. Microsoft's WebTV is also a customer.

Online grocer Peapod bought two T-1 links from InterNAP. "We were looking at individual peering relations," said Jason Wessel, a senior system administrator for Peapod. "But we just found that InterNAP would give us better coverage among all the networks."

"They're making all the right moves," said Don Fosen, chief information officer for art.com, an Internet gallery that sells framed art prints over the Web. "We started selling through Yahoo in February and [America Online] in March, and we're getting 1.5 million hits daily, with a 10% to 15% increase in orders every week. We used to go through a public NAP, but every day at 1:30 the Internet got busy and our performance suffered. So we went looking for really good connectivity, and we found it in InterNAP."

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