Internet access provider Genuity seems to have caught the holiday spirit. On Tuesday, the company opened a nonprofit network-access point (NAP) for fellow ISPs in Phoenix, Arizona.
Still, don't let the philanthropy fool you - Genuity is clearly a .com, not an .org.
"If the telcos and [the Baby Bells] won't build the infrastructure for us, we'll build it ourselves and provide it for free as long as the cost model works," Rodney Joffe, Genuity's chief technology officer told Wired News.
That "cost model" is simply the freedom from access charges approaching US$5,000 per month for each ISP moving data across the Net's major thoroughfares. Genuity's new NAP routes network traffic between customers in the Phoenix area who use different service providers, lowering the access providers' costs.
Up to now, the network, maintained by Arizona State University, has routed Internet traffic out to the national access points at MAE West and East, in San Jose and Washington, DC, respectively, even if both recipient and sender were in Arizona.
Local/regional network access points are nothing new; in fact, several smaller access points have cropped up across the country. But the nonprofit model is new, and Genuity hopes to duplicate it across the country. Customers will see better Internet service with less waiting and downtime. Joffe wants to set an example for the telcos to follow.
Joffe sees a ready soapbox in the oversight efforts by telcos such as MFS Telecom of the old NFSNet. The "big telephone companies" such as MFS are not moving fast enough to keep pace with the mushrooming growth of the Internet, he said.
"They should be building more [access points], not asking for more money," said Joffe, whose own company is a subsidiary of Bechtel.
While Joffe seemed comfortable positioning Genuity as David going up against the Goliath telcos, for its part, MFS welcomed the effort.
Despite the largess of MFS, regional and local access points have cropped up in the Washington, DC, area to fill a need MFS cannot, said Bob Barbour, MFS director of marketing.
MFS has seen its eastern access point, which sees roughly 63 percent of the nation's Internet traffic, grow exponentially and continue to attract some of the largest Internet service providers - a fact Barbour attributed to his company's quick attention to maintenance of the network.
"[The eastern access point] wouldn't be in existence and growing if it were not a viable piece of the Internet backbone," said Barbour.
