Metro Ethernet lets Yipes stand on its own

By David Rohde
Network World, 10/16/00

So what are you, a CLEC?, I ask. Frank Robles gives me a knowing look. The co-founder of Yipes Communications, an emerging metropolitan Ethernet service provider, senses where I'm heading.

"Well, one of our subsidiaries is a CLEC," Robles says, leaning almost disparagingly on the word. He explains apologetically that Yipes needs a certificate as a competitive local exchange carrier to gain access to certain building risers.

But I'd better not make too much of that, because the last thing Yipes wants is to categorize itself as a CLEC and carry the baggage that entails.

Yipes provides pure, transparent LAN service and Internet access from 1M bit/sec to 1G bit/sec. It employs managed Extreme Networks gigabit switches at customer premises and local points of presence, plus Juniper routers to connect metropolitan rings for WAN service. It obtains local transport from wholesale dark-fiber providers and backbone connections from the likes of UUNET and Level 3.

The result is corporate or extranet connections with guaranteed latency under 10 milliseconds across a regional ring, and potential long-haul corporate networks well below frame relay prices.

Now here's what Yipes doesn't do. It doesn't rent copper loops from Bell companies. It doesn't demand telephone companies' line-sharing to provide DSL service. It doesn't beg for federally regulated cageless collocation in Bell central offices. That means it _doesn't run whining to the government if the telcos won't share their sandbox. If Yipes even has a lawyer or lobbyist, it hasn't told me.

Yipes also doesn't engage in the CLEC practice of "reciprocal compensation," a regulated method of billing back telcos for ISP traffic that traverses several local networks. Recently the CLECs' trade group, facing several CLEC bankruptcies, unleashed a furious lobbying attack against a Bell-backed plan to end reciprocal compensation. But Robles has contempt for CLECs that substitute intercarrier payment schemes for their inability to come up with a better mousetrap for users.

"They're trying to get the government to prop them up, and reciprocal compensation is one way to do it," he says.

Robles also doesn't fall all over himself yapping about convergence. He never even mentions voice over IP until I bring it up near the end of our meeting.

Oh sure, he says, Yipes will present a voice-over-IP strategy in 2001, but the company is about data - a boatload of it. Let other carriers push clever little integrated T-1 boxes for small offices. Yipes wants to end the large user's heartbreak of having to order T-3 service at exactly 45M bit/sec and then waiting six months for the circuit.

Yipes is available in a dozen markets, and several imitators are just getting going. But is it possible we finally have a local carrier that's willing to let its service stand for itself? I guess I'll know the party's over when Yipes feels the need to call an urgent press conference with its Washington lobbyist.