BellSouth announces NAP decision

Aug 07, 2000

By Karen J. Cohen, dbusiness.com

MIAMI, Fla., Aug. 7 (dbusiness.com) -- The Network Access Point tussle is heating up, with BellSouth's morning announcement that it will create its own South Florida NAP.

Meanwhile the NAP of the Americas group on Friday named T-Rex as the developer of a NAP to be located in the company's Miami-based facility. T-Rex is short for Telecom Routing Exchange Developers, a wholly owned subsidiary of Terremark Woldwide Inc., based in Coconut Grove.

A NAP is a giant switching station that reroutes Internet traffic when congestion slows down transmission. The presence of a NAP is thought vital to drawing more high-tech communications companies to South Florida and turning the area into the Internet Coast, as some have already dubbed it.

The NAP of the Americas group, which includes 41 companies, decided in early summer that Miami was their site of choice for a NAP. Meanwhile, BellSouth declined to join the NAP of the Americas and, instead, proposed a number of smaller stations, or a wide-area-network, with nodes up and down the coast. That, said BellSouth spokesman Spero Canton, is what Internet service providers have said they prefer.

According to Canton, the switching station will be up and running by the end of the year. But instead of building a new facility from scratch, BellSouth will connect a number of facilities already existant through several of its partners.

They will have nodes in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, downtown Miami and west Miami Dade. He said that the resulting complex will be a tier 1 facility.

"Instead of saying build it and they will come, we are building it where they are," Canton said.


In its Monday announcement, the communications giant said that it, along with FPL Fibernet, Tampa-based Intermedia, Qwest, International Wireless Communications; Netrail, Diveo and UUNET, a WorldCom company, will create a NAP with multiple connection points through Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

The group has named it the FloridaMIX, standing for Florida Multiple Internet Exchange. It will be available to all Internet service providers and will not require any purchase of transport from BellSouth in order to participate, the company said.

The proposed Miami NAP would be the fifth major NAP site in the country, after Washington, New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Meanwhile, NAP watchers have their own takes on the latest developments.

Bruce Sher, president of Mergenet Solutions Inc., a Boca Raton-based incubator, and a member of the NAP of Americas group, said the danger is that BellSouth's announcement will drain resources away from the initial effort. The tug-of-war between the two groups has a lot to do with a kind of high-tech personality clash between the younger start-up companies and the older, established telecoms, he said.

"I think they were getting left out of the loop," he said. "It's a dog-eat-dog world."

But others see BellSouth as consolidating its position as a telecom heavyweight.

Unclogged Internet routes are particularly important to companies like TvTaxi.com, which sends rich multimedia mixes across the 'Net. Dan Beyer, TvTaxi.com director of business development, said that BellSouth has two tier 1 providers on board - Qwest and UUNET. Such companies are bandwidth originators and sell their products to the smaller firms.

"The NAP of the Americas was going to be a tier 1 NAP. You have to get a tier 1 provider, otherwise you won't get a tier 1 NAP. They are the deity of bandwidth," Beyer said.

"One of the reasons you want to go on the NAP, it's like the Golden Glades interchange," he said. "You'll have access to every server from there."