How good is your ISP?

UNTIL now, judging the performance of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) has been well nigh impossible, relying on anecdotal evidence dial-up users' complaints of constant busy signals, or discovering that email you sent at 10 in the morning didn't reach your client in California until 3 in the afternoon.

That has all changed, according to a young startup in Silicon Valley called Inverse Network Technologies. Using specially-developed software and a phalanx of "Dialbots", Inverse phones in to the top 21 ISPs in the United States, at the rate of 125,000 calls per month, and measures their dial-up response across a wide range of criteria.

Inverse tracks such major ISPs as America Online, CompuServe, AT&T Worldnet, Microsoft Network, Sprint, MCI, UUNet, IBM Global Network, and Net Corn.

"We're measuring end-to-end performance," says its vice president of marketing, Jennifer Bester. "We do comprehensive network testing." In other words, Inverse logs the response of an ISP from the point a modem connects with the service to the end destination of the call, for example, tracking an email message from the point a user clicks send" to its arrival at its target in-box.

Inverse's customers range from ISPs themselves to corporations and vendors of Internet products and services. All have their own reasons for wanting to know call failure rate, login failure rates, the speed at which modems typically connect, the time it takes to download from the Web, or the time it takes email to travel to its destination.

"The majority of the top ISPs are customers," says Bester. "ISPs want a great deal of information on themselves, then enough on the competition so that they can benchmark themselves against them." They can also determine where the bottlenecks in their service are, and decide on cost-effective solutions.

And they use the information for self-promotion in an increasingly cutthroat Internet business, where the cost of subscriptions has been driven down as the big telecom companies such as MCI, Sprint and AT&T - with their capacity for mass marketing have started offering dial-up Internet subscription services for customers in the US.

"The Internet is being driven down to a 1995 price point, where it's very hard to make money," Bester says. "It's now trying to distinguish itself in terms of quality."

Corporate customers, on the other hand, want to know the performance and reliability of their ISP and its competition. Thus, good news for one set of customers can be bad news for another. "Well, we knew we had to provide value and also be almost heartbreakingly objective," Bester concedes.

She says corporate clients at the moment are interested in call failure rates, after the publicity surrounding America Online's problems earlier this year, and they also want email details. However, "the larger corporations look not so much at email but Web throughput [the time it takes information to travel across the Web]," she says noting that there's a 50 per cent differential between the worst and best ISPs they've measured.

She says that while up to now they have offered services to the larger ISPs, they recognise that smaller competitors would be interested in the information too. Therefore, they are looking at ways of assembling less detailed - and therefore less costly - services for the little guys. But she says that the Dialbots will accrue over $ l million in phone charges during a year of operation, and that goes into their calculation of appropriate customer charges.

At the moment, the Dialbots target 40 metropolitan areas across the US, 24 hours a day, using the kind of setup an average North American user would have: a Pentium PC with l6 MB of RAM and a US Robotics Sportster 33.6 modem.

But they're now eyeing the major cities in Europe, including London, for expansion over the next six months - they figure companies here would like the same information, and US corporations also tend to need global Internet access for roaming employees.

"I think our customers are going to drive us overseas," Bester says.