InterNap is going out of business.
I have designed many ISP's and Data Centers as my background is Engineering. Any decent size ISP does what InterNap does. All InterNap does is buy transit from 8 of the top carriers. They bundle it together into their network edge and provision a single feed to customers that is fed by the mix of 8. InterNap is nothing more than any other multi-homed ISP. The only difference is that InterNap has special program they developed that will tweak the BGP metrics and send traffic out the fastest carrier for that particular session. InterNap sells their software in "intelligent routing" hardware packages to other ISP's so they can do the same thing.
InterNap has done a good job at "selling" people something by using alot of smoke and mirrors.
Here is the bottom line:
Once an ISP has 3+ carriers adding a 4th, 5th, 6th, etc... makes little difference in performance, especially if the first 3 are some of the top carriers like ATT, MCI and Sprint. Beyond that it makes little difference. You might pick up a millisecond or two by adding 5 more carriers but the cost/performance ratio is not even worth it. If you use InterNap you might see a 5 millisecond improvement across the board due to their "special" software. But really, you can find a good multi-homed ISP who can sell you much cheaper bandwidth and all you need to do is sacrafice a few milliseconds.
Besides, Cisco, Juniper, Lucent, etc... are beginning to wrap "intelligent routing" into their hardware products (routers and switches) so latency, loss and jitter are addressed which are the only things that InterNap's special software calculates to help improve performance.
InterNap is a VALUE ADDED RESELLER of the ATT and MCI's of the world. Value added resellers are just that, resellers.
InterNap is not a carrier at all.
Forecast for InterNap... going down hard. Gone in 5 years.
Sure, the stock may have a run or two but the company does nothing special nor has anything special. There are 5,000 other ISP's out there that do nearly the exact same thing. It's called providing managed multi-homed connectivity to customers.
Let me know if you want a list. |
