Pushpendra Mohta, of AT&T's CERFnet unit, discusses the future
infoworld.com
August 10, 1998
By Michael Vizard
InfoWorld Electric
AT&T late last month finalized its acquisition of Teleport Communications Group, a
local exchange service provider based in New York. As part of that deal, AT&T also
acquired TCG's Internet service provider business unit, known as CERFnet. This unit will
now form the backbone of AT&T's Internet services for corporate customers.
Pushpendra Mohta, who now serves as executive vice president of this business unit,
outlined the company's emerging strategy to InfoWorld Executive News Editor Michael
Vizard.
InfoWorld: What is the relationship between AT&T's other ISP services and the
services being offered by CERFnet?
Mohta: AT&T has a product offering called WorldNet that has consumer customers.
What we were doing was sort of a superset of what their product offers. In terms of
business access, they just got into that about a year and a half ago. We've been doing this
for 10 years. Our backbone, at this point, is bigger than their backbone.
And we have many more private peer relationships than they do. We'll take all these
things, toss them up, and see what shapes up.
InfoWorld: How big is CERFnet's infrastructure?
Mohta: We have a backbone that spans OC-3 and OC-12 circuits. It goes to about 35
cities and services 85 markets from those cities. We'll need an OC-48 network by the
end of the year. We also have eight Web-hosting centers, located throughout the country.
TCG was actually the largest competitive local exchange carrier, so they're bigger than
[WorldCom's MFS subsidiary]. A lot of people know about MFS, but not TCG.
InfoWorld: What are the implications of the recent AT&T alliance with British Telecom?
Mohta: We need to have end-to-end control over the infrastructure in order to deliver
quality of service. Before this deal, an ISP would have sent traffic over an amazing
number of providers.
At the time of [CERFNet's] merger with TCG, the choice was to merge with the person
who owns the local facility or merge with somebody who owns wide area traffic. We
chose the local merger first because when we looked at the statistics on carriers, 40
percent of the failures were power-related and 40 percent were related to the last mile.
And the cost of accessing that last mile from the [Regional Bell Operating Companies,
RBOCs] was atrocious. So [CERFNet] merged with TCG, which was then acquired by
AT&T.
So now you have a combination of a really large ISP, the largest local exchange carrier,
and AT&T. You have to remember that AT&T pays $12 billion a year in access fees to
the RBOCs, so they needed local access. That's also why they want TCI, because the
only other way to gain local access is over cable.
InfoWorld: Are the providers with strong fiber networks, such as TCG the ones most
likely to be acquired?
Mohta: AT&T was a long-distance company, so they had fiber from San Diego to New
York, but they did not have fiber once it got into somewhere such as San Diego. They
just didn't have a distribution network. That's why they had to use Nynex on one end and
Pacific Bell on the other end. But Nynex and Pacific Bell don't have fiber either, so they
really don't have the same capacity.
InfoWorld: This all means less competition down the road. What is driving all these
acquisitions?
Mohta: The marketplace is shrinking for two reasons. We all understand that we need
to control the facility and get to scale. So there's a business reason to merge and a
technical reason to merge.
InfoWorld: Are you seeing increased demand for Web hosting, or are people now more
comfortable with running their own Web sites?
Mohta: As a provider, you need to determine the comfort factor of the customer and
show them that your infrastructure is going to grow with them better than what they might
want to try to build themselves. You can only bring so much bandwidth down to a site.
But should the content flow over to the backbone, then we have the redundancy to
support it. Most customers couldn't possibly create such a large infrastructure. But there
are some legal restrictions sometimes on where certain content can live, so you will now
see a lot of mixed sites as well.
InfoWorld: What role does the ISP play in extranet development?
Mohta: Very few [ISPs] have their own facilities. There are true infrastructure
companies and everyone else is leasing capacity. There may be different services, but the
core of the network is IP. I find it amusing that some ISPs claim they can make a
network that is better for the pharmaceutical industry than for the automotive industry,
because all you're doing is shipping IP packets. There are 2,500 ISPs, but what are they
going to do going forward? I think they'll become resellers, for the infrastructure
companies.
InfoWorld: Everybody is talking about quality-of-service agreements, but nobody
seems to know how to measure them. Will anything change here?
Mohta: First, [users] need to know when they're not getting [the correct bandwidth].
We do one thing that nobody else does in that we publish real-time data on network
performance. We measure things like delay from point to point on our network and
packet loss ratios. And I think very soon, when we can control the facilities end-to-end,
we'll be able to make even more significant guarantees.
InfoWorld: Ultimately, what will be the relationship between data and voice on networks?
Mohta: I think voice will be a very small component. It's just a question of when data
will surpass voice traffic. Just look at what's happening with fax traffic as it moves to the
Internet. There are other services, such as inbound 800 services, that will move to the
Web also. And IP telephony is on the rise too. The things I used to pick up the phone to
do, I can now do on the Net much faster and in a more customized way.
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