Internap's P-nap manoeuvres to avoid choking

The launch in Europe of a service to bypass 'choke points' on thepass bottlenecks. internet has been promised by US start-up company, Internap Network Services.

Internap has raised $32m (#20m) in venture capital to catapult it into 11 new markets across the US and to set up its first private network access point (P-nap) to the internet in Europe.

Although the European site has yet to be determined, company officials expect it to be up and running by the end of the year, with several additional sites due to follow by 2000.

The three-year-old Seattle-based company's P-naps act as hubs, working like a collapsed internet backbone, providing direct delivery connections to the internet. The technology is based on proprietary symmetric routing equipment that can direct data over the internet backbone, while minimising router hops and bypassing the congestion and packet loss associated with public exchange points.

But instead of building a nationwide network, Internap buys bandwidth on existing backbones and pays for how much network capacity it needs.

Customers include Amazon.com, Adobe, Microsoft and Safeway; as well as ISPs in Washington state.

Tony Naughtin, Internap's president and CEO, said: "We're offering a high-performance network that's able to bypass the public internet exchanges or network access point choke points, 90 per cent of the time."

He continued that symmetrical routing pushes and pulls traffic directly in and out of backbones where uncongested routes reside. The company's patented proprietary technology is called Assimilator and relies on databases that track congestion at public exchanges.

"Assimilator allows us to route traffic to public backbones that are less congested than others. In a normal scenario, internet traffic going out over MCI's backbone might be indiscriminately bounced back over, say UUnet's, whereas Assimilator avoids such traffic bouncing," he claimed.

Internap's system is based on specialised routing software and high-capacity connections to tap directly into nine global backbones, which handle connections to about 95 per cent of internet destinations around the world, to carry the traffic sent by its hubs.

"This allows our customers to bypass the less efficient system that trades traffic from one backbone to another until it finally arrives at the destination," said Naughtin.

Internap has also announced that it will develop, deploy and support internet services for business customers with Cisco. Its latest financing was provided by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter venture: Partners, Fidelity Ventures and Oak Investments.