And from that same issue of Upstart: YIPES! WHAT PIPES!: Metro LANs get a caffeine boost
telecomclick.com
by Ed Gubbins
First of all: Before you make fun of the name "Yipes," consider the current net worth of the guys who decided that "Yahoo!" would be a good name for a company. Next, be aware that the company's founders rejected 850 names in favor of "Yipes." (Some possibly discarded names: "Zoinks!," "Eeeaah!" and "I Can't Believe it's Not ATM!") Finally, note the handy benefits of the name: It's fun to say. It hints at their customers' experience. It includes the letters IP (which the carrier runs over Ethernet). And it reduces the company slogan ("Yipes, that's fast!") to a three-syllable utterance for people who are really on the go.
Of course, when your slogan is "Yipes, that's fast!" you really have to move. And so far no one has suggested changing the name. By May, the company had announced selling high-speed Internet access and managed LAN-to-LAN connections in five cities, was selling in 12 unannounced cities and was starting to build in 30. It had about 1000 miles of fiber lit. And it had only been out of stealth mode for nine weeks.
"Seems pretty good to me," says Christine Heckart, president of the telecom consultancy TeleChoice, sadly missing an opportunity to spout the Yipes slogan in assessing the carrier's deployment speed.
Though Yipes admitted to having fewer than 50 customers in May, it claimed a quicker customer-per-market growth rate than DSL start-ups. The only thing company officials will admit is growing faster than Yipes is the demand for it.
Yipes offers relief to enterprises trapped in what it calls "the frustration zone" between a 1.5 Mb/s T-1 line and a 45 Mb/s T-3. The Yipes pipe is 2 Gb/s: 1 Gb/s for use and the other for redundancy. It will sell the service in any megabit-chunk size between T-1 and T-3 that customers need. Once customers pay the $1000 initial installation fee, they can turn up their capacity with a phone call rather than a forklift. Yipes manages the network and can provision bandwidth increases within a few hours and in 1 Mb/s increments. (Gosh, that's granular!)
The Yipes network is also decidedly simpler than traditional TDM networks. It uses IP over fiber to connect Ethernet LANs and replaces a jumble of ATM switches and muxes with just two pieces of equipment: a management router at the LAN and a gigabit router at the WAN.
Heckart: "The Yipes network is very simple, very streamlined, and while they need people who really understand routing - and those people are expensive - the big cost [for service providers] is in provisioning, operating and customer support. And if you've got a streamlined infrastructure like they do, you might have a streamlined business model on top of it."
Using Ethernet is key in building a simpler network because corporate IT managers are already familiar with it and because most Internet traffic starts and ends as Ethernet anyway. Ron Young, Yipes' VP of marketing and business development, puts it this way: "If you could start from scratch and build a data network like you wanted to in a greenfield environment, you would do basically what we do. You'd take super-fast Ethernet packets and connect them to somebody else with Ethernet packets and change them as little as you could."
Of course, if you did that, you might confront a lot of reservation in the carrier community about using Ethernet, which wasn't designed to stray much beyond its own backyard. So you'd have to tell everyone, as Young has, about what Ethernet can really do. You'd have to tell them that it can now go more than 70 kilometers without regeneration. That collision problems no longer exist. That an IEEE group is working on a draft for 10 Gb/s Ethernet standards by the end of the year. That QOS software for IP over Gig E is rapidly evolving. And that, in the mean time, having ample bandwidth alleviates the need for QOS anyway.
"People said, `What about the fact that ATM and Sonet are these bulletproof applications that provide five nines [in reliability]?' We'd say, `That's true, they do, and we're only going to provide four nines, but how many nines does your PC have? Four nines is totally acceptable,'" says Young. He says to expect a reliability of five nines in Gig E by next spring.
For the moment, Yipes customers seem to be more interested in what the company can do right now. Front Range Internet, a Denver-area ISP, became a Yipes customer when one of its own enterprise clients wanted 10 Mb/s service as soon as they could get it. Barry Eastman, Front Range's business manager, says ordering an ATM circuit from U S West would have taken six months, whereas Yipes promised the hook-up in less than two months. Part of the reason, says Eastman, is that fiber is easier to install than copper. But also, Yipes is free from what Eastman calls "the political nightmare" of ILEC procedure as well as the risk involved in expensive installations.
"CLECs usually need to know they'll get a lot of business before deploying a DSLAM because it's expensive," says Young. "With Yipes, they don't need such a big commitment. Due to the rapidly falling cost of Ethernet boxes, we can afford to put a 2 Gb/s box in the basement even if we only have one customer [in the building]." Yipes generally looks at customer needs above 3 Mb/s and charges $150 per Mb/s.
Yipes may one day be Front Range's competitor as well as its supplier, but Heckart says not any time soon. "They're in a cream-skimming mode right now," she says. "They're not into penetration. When they start seeing a lot more competitors, they'll probably become a lot more aggressive."
They may need another exclamation point. |
