s Internet access increasingly be
comes a commodity, more Internet service providers are trying to distinguish themselves with claims of better service. Some ISPs are giving corporate customers the ability to monitor their Net connections. A growing number of providers are offering money-back guar- antees. ISPs are also banding together to work on reliability issues.
Network Intensive in Irvine, Calif., which mainly serves corporate customers in Southern California, last month became the latest ISP to offer such a guarantee. If a customer loses its Internet access, or is denied its guaranteed bandwidth, it can ask for a refund of that month's charge. "It's 100% customer satisfaction or your money back," says Network
Intensive CEO Edward Milstein.
Network Intensive uses software called Network Health from Concord Communications Inc. in Marlboro, Mass., to analyze bottlenecks encountered by customers. Routers are monitored every five minutes and customers receive periodic printed reports on their performance, Milstein says. Other ISPs,
including Ameritech and MCI, use the same software. Companies whose Web sites are hosted by Network Intensive can also find out how well they are performing by logging on to the company's site with a password and examining the most recent six weeks of performance data.
Thomas Bros. Maps in Irvine switched to Network Intensive last year when the map seller upgraded from a 56-Kbps connection to a T1 (1.544 Mbps) line. One reason was the fact that Network Intensive monitored performance, says Patrick O'Shaughnessy, director of MIS. The ISP "is probably higher than most in pricing," he adds, "but it's worth it."
However, a single ISP can't guarantee the performance of the entire Internet. Network Intensive's data shows that about 40% of network problems are the fault of phone company networks or other ISPs.
As a result, nine ISPs last month formed an organization called IOPS.ORG to work on resolving Internet service problems. The group includes ANS Communications, AT&T, BBN Planet, EarthLink Network,
GTE, MCI, Netcom On-Line Communications Services, PSINet, and UUNet Technologies. The goal is the capability to monitor-and possibly guarantee-the flow of data across multiple ISP networks.
Taking a similar tack is Verio Inc. in Denver, which has acquired minority stakes in 19 ISPs nationwide, including Network Intensive. Verio is trying to raise $150 million more through a bond offering to buy more ISPs and build a nationwide backbone through which Verio will be able to monitor the performance of all of its local ISPs.
BBN Planet in Cambridge, Mass., and Concentric Network Corp. in Cupertino, Calif., are among other ISPs that offer service guarantees. BBN offers a full day of credit to customers who experience 15 minutes of downtime within a 24-hour period due to the BBN backbone. Concentric guarantees that data transfers for its T1 customers will not take more than 150 milliseconds to cross its network.
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s Internet access increasingly be
comes a commodity, more Internet service providers are trying to distinguish themselves with claims of better service. Some ISPs are giving corporate customers the ability to monitor their Net connections. A growing number of providers are offering money-back guar- antees. ISPs are also banding together to work on reliability issues.
