Start-up aims to ease 'Net overload

By Sandra Gittlen
Network World Fusion, 10/16/98

If you're tired of hearing your ISP tell you that your traffic is slow because of congestion at MCI WorldCom's public Internet traffic exchanges, you may be in for a reprieve from a Cisco-backed upstart.

Equinix, a $10.4 million company funded by the internetwork gear giant, Stanford University and venture capital firm Benchmark Capital, is building state-of-the-art facilities where ISPs can connect, or peer, with each other. The company hopes that providing a peering facility that is not under the shadow of carriers such as Sprint or MCI WorldCom will offer ISPs and large businesses the freedom to sample the latest and greatest equipment, providing greater quality of service (QoS) and quicker Internet response times for end users.

Based in Redwood City, Calif., Equinix is differentiating itself from the public Metropolitan Area Exchange points (MAE) and the carrier-run network access points (NAP) by solely offering "neutral interconnect points," a source says. While the MAEs offer all ISPs the chance to hand off traffic to one another via high-speed connections, private peering points can be restrictive because of their high traffic load requirements. However, because all ISPs want at least some of their traffic to run through them, the MAEs get congested, and Internet performance degrades.

To avoid the strain this slowdown can cause on their networks, ISPs often set up peering agreements with other ISPs. The more geographical points at which an ISP can appear the better the network performance for its customers.

Therefore, Equinix, is establishing 25 sites - 15 national and 10 international - within the next year and a half. The first sites will be located in Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago.

Each site will allow ISPs to host equipment and connect to each other via fiber or Category 5 coaxial cable. "They can use packet over SONET, ATM, Multi-protocol Label Switching, whatever," the source says. "Customers will decide what approach they want." The source says Equinix's model is different from the MAEs because they are constrained by a centralized model featuring an FDDI or ATM switch that ISPs plug into.

At the Equinix sites, ISPs will connect directly to each other or install a central switch among several ISPs. By directly peering with one another over a high-speed wire instead of the local loop, ISPs can guarantee higher QoS. This can lead to stronger service-level agreements (SLA) for customers, says Eric Hindin, director of network solutions at The Yankee Group in Boston. Often, he says, ISPs pad SLAs to account for poor performance at public exchange points.

Equinix founders Al Avery and Jay Adelson started this project while at Digital with the Palo Alto Internet Exchange.

But for all Equinix's promise, some ISPs say they are not sold on the idea. "I don't see it being remarkably better or different," says Antonio Salerno, CEO of Conxion in Santa Clara, Calif. "If you're not already doing OC-12 interconnects in at least seven places, we're not interested."