merican Communications Services Inc. will soon offer small and medium-sized businesses throughout the South a f
ull menu of data and Internet services, targeting a customer base largely ignored by major Internet service providers.
The competitive local exchange carrier is positioning itself as a one-stop shop for Web hosting, ATM and frame-relay wide area networking, Internet connectivity, firewall security, routing, and other enterprise services. ACSI, in Annapolis Junction, Md., will market the services under the e.spire brand name through its Advance Data Services division.
With national ISPs and regional Bell companies focusing on large accounts, ACSI will tap smaller businesses with a comprehensive but lower-priced set of services, says Vernon Irvin, senior VP of Advanced Data. Pricing is determined by geographical location and bandwidth consumed. The Internet connectivity service, for instance, costs anywhere from $295 to $18,950 per month. But Irvin points out that as a competitive local exchange carrier, ACSI has consistently undercut the prices of former monopoly local telcos.
Chris Mines, an anal
yst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., notes that "there's plenty of opportunity for smaller, regional ISPs to take advantage of their knowledge of the customer." But Mines' fellow analyst at Forrester, David Cooperstein, believes ACSI has cast too wide a net. "Eventually, they will have to focus on whether they're an ISP or a hosting company," he says.
Jeff Ramer, director of IS at ImageNet International, an advertising agency in New York, thinks the ACSI approach could work in markets nationwide. "First, it would be much easier if everything came from one company, and I would be interested in better customer service," Ramer says. "The ISPs make all of their money off big corporate clients and they don't really bother with the smaller sites."
ACSI's Advanced Data unit initially will offer its package in Florida; eventually, it will roll out the services to 45 cities from the Atlantic seaboard to the southern Mountain States.
But Mines notes that while ACSI is used to competing agains
t alternative access carriers such as MCI Metro and MFS Communications, as an ISP it will be taking on bigger companies, at least in some instances. "BellSouth has its act together and is much further along than the other regional Bells," Mines says. "And unfortunately, that's the region where ACSI lives."
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merican Communications Services Inc. will soon offer small and medium-sized businesses throughout the South a f
ull menu of data and Internet services, targeting a customer base largely ignored by major Internet service providers.
