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Technology Stocks : Internap Network Services Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jibacoa who wrote (441)	8/9/2002 1:51:12 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1011

Bernard, That's an interesting story, but it as far as I know Charles Brewer has little to do directly with Internap. Charles Brewer started Mindspring, but I've never seen Charles Brewer's name associated with the company (and can't find any references now). Internap was founded by Tony Naughtin in 1996. Here's his bio from the March 2001 10-K: Anthony C. Naughtin founded Internap and has served as our Chief Executive Officer and President since May 1996. Mr. Naughtin has also served as a director since October 1997. Prior to founding Internap, he was vice president for commercial network services at ConnectSoft, Inc., an Internet and e-mail software developer, from May 1995 to May 1996. From February 1992 to May 1995, Mr. Naughtin was the director of sales at NorthWestNet, an NSFNET regional network. Mr. Naughtin has served as a director of Fine.com International Corp., a services-computer processing and data preparation company since December 1996. Mr. Naughtin holds a Bachelor of Arts in communications from the University of Iowa and is a graduate of the Creighton School of Law. As I posted earlier on this board, Tony is married to a college friends of my wife's. In May of 1994 or 1995 (sorry, I don't remember which off the top of my head) we went up to Seattle for a vacation. We had other friends in the area as well, one of whom was Rob Shurtleff. My wife had worked in the early and mid-80s for Rob at HP, but Rob had gone to work for Microsoft and had done well there and was looking for someplace to invest his money. We invited them all to a dinner to meet each other (we had no idea at the time that Tony had the idea for Internap, or that Rob was looking for someplace to invest his money -- we just thought they might like each other). We found out in 1996 that Rob had become an angel investor for Tony and had helped obtain additional funding to get Internap started. If you go back to the earlier 10-Ks, you'll find Rob's name as well. Also, Internap's benefit isnt' that it uses BGP tables and can send traffic back to the recipient via another path than that path it was sent out on. As I understand it (and I'm not an expert in this area by any means), BGP support is standard in every router out there. The problem Internap addresses (from a white paper that used to be on their site, though I haven't looked to see if it's still there) is that a lot of traffic is lost on the Internet because the backbone providers have no incentive to forward traffic that isn't destined for one of their own customers. Instead, they dump the message as quickly as they can onto another backbone provider at one of the peering points. That provider, in turn, dumps it onto another backbone provider, ad infinitum, and it takes forever to get back to the recipient of the message, if it makes it back at all (I think Internap used to say that 40% of the traffic on the Internet was simply "lost" during peak times of the day). The backbone guys want to provide the best service for their own traffic, but don't particularly care about messages being sent to customers on other backbones. Internap's value-add is that they have patented technology to figure out exactly which backbone the message should be placed on to provide the fastest routing to the recipient (and it goes beyond simple BGP tables). That's why they have all the major backbones coming into each P-NAP site. Most ISPs simply bring in backbones from one, maybe two, vendors to dump traffic onto. By having all backbones come in to each site, Internap can route the traffic through the Internet on the wires whose owner has the most incentive to get it to the recipient. And while I haven't seen it written anywhere, since Internap also watches Internet traffic closely, they can probably also send traffic from one P-NAP to another P-NAP (even if it's not on the "final" backbone) to get around any slow spots on the internet. The final P-NAP can then put it on the correct backbone. An ISP with a single backbone has to send it out on that backbone regardless of the current performance. But Internap's strength is the intelligence they've patented to put traffic on the correct backbone as quickly as possible, not just the fact that with multiple backbones coming into each building, they can route it around the bottlenecks. Maybe a simpler way of saying it is that knowing how to get a packet to the recipient isn't the same as optimizing how it gets back to the recipient. The address of the recipient, combined with the tables in the routers, gives a guide of how to get it back and other vendors use this strategy. Internap, however, seeks to optimize the path back. FWIW, Dave