James Crowe, the tough-minded CEO who built the former MFS into a plum that WorldCom, Inc. bought for $14 billion in 1996, believes the Internet is the network of the future. And he is sure it will improve as independent carriers with high-capacity networks and careful traffic management blend their resources into the mix of networks that is the Internet.
Crowe now leads Level 3 Communications, Inc., a planned IP voice, data and video fiber-optic network already backed by $3 billion in assets from Kiewit Diversified Group, of Omaha, Neb. He recently talked to Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene about the future of Level 3 and the Net.
How did you come up with the idea for this new network?
Back in 1995, we were merrily building at MFS a fiber-based circuit-switched global network.
Then, for a variety of reasons, we started looking at IP and the Internet. The more we looked, the more we came to the conclusion that business-oriented [Internet service providers] were in the same business as MFS; they just had a technology that was more cost-effective for lots of stuff in 1995 and was improving far more quickly than circuit-switched technology.
You seem to rely on upcoming technology to provide quality of service, right?
There is technical development needed. But there is also the process of showing customers that our business practices are such that we can be trusted with valuable mission-critical information.
So you will use the Internet as part of your backbone?
No one has a high-speed connection to everywhere. If [carriers do not] have a high-speed connection to Omaha, they dump it to somebody else who comes here. Do they use the Internet for their backbone? Yes, for some of their customers.
So you want to be an integral part of the Internet, only make it more responsive?
That's a good way of putting it.
When you are up and running, you won't be selling frame relay service, for example, you'll be selling IP tone?
When we're up and running, I would hope you would say, `Why would I want to buy frame? I can buy the same service on an IP backbone at a lower cost with the kind of quality and reliability I need.' The job that we have is to make certain that our business customers trust us. What services will Level 3 offer?
Today, as we speak, IP-based networks are suitable for [data traffic].
Over the next couple of years, we fully expect to see deployment of technologies that allow us to handle voice and video - tag switching, et cetera.
Can you describe what your network hardware will look like beyond being based on data communications technology?
Our goal is to build a network that can accommodate unpredictable technical change, if not elegantly, then more elegantly than our competitors.
We think the road is littered with people who took a religious view of technology and then got surprised.
