Sometimes a successful connectivity business isn't all about the size of the pipe—it's about the company that stands behind the infrastructure and knows how to take care of customer's data traversing through it.

by Jim Wagner of internetnews.com [February 13, 2001]

Over the past few years, the industry has seen the rise and subsequent fall of many national service providers. Some ISPs were bought and sold, others fell victim to financial pressures, and others still simply faded into oblivion.

Successful national providers grew their business slowly—diligently guided by a strong business plan, hard work, long hours, and solid leadership—determined to bring its services to the masses.

While most headlines in the news today herald dot-come failures, one firm has eluded various perils and pitfalls inherent to playing in this competitive arena. It's Epoch Internet, and this company is proof positive that hard-work and a good business plan goes a long way.

A little history
Epoch is a national ISP in the enviable position of also maintaining a backbone. Epoch was able to leverage its infrastructure to support an aggressive business plan, making it first-to-market with several different value-added services. As a result, Epoch is the largest privately held ISP and Webhosting firm in the U.S. today.

The company got its start in Costa Mesa, California around 1994 when its entire staff consisted of four people with access to a local backbone. By the end of the year, the company was one of the first ISPs connected to the Commercial Internet eXchange, a predecessor of today's Network Access Points.

Epoch grew its customer base organically and otherwise. The ISP bought Planetcom in 1995, which gave it coast-to-coast dial-up coverage. Working quickly to meld the two firms, Epoch expanded services and became one of the first providers to offer 56K Internet access nationwide.

Discontent with providing just dial-up access, Epoch eyed other service opportunities being extended to the market.

Before the Internet Yellow Pages was purchased by GTE Corp. in 1995, it was a brainchild created by Epoch technicians. According to Epoch officials, its engineers were also among the first to configure servers capable of hosting multiple domain names in a single box, and Epoch was the first ISP to offer metered Internet access in the U.S.

Epoch even got its feet wet in the domain name business and has been registering generic top-level domain names since it was first approved by the Internet Council of Registrars in 1997.

In 1999, Epoch executives decided to pool these separate services into one comprehensive service bundle for businesses—offering everything from Webhosting and domain name registration to dedicated Internet connectivity and consultancy services.

With a fully redundant OC-12 backbone connected to all major U.S. NAPs, Epoch is able to lease lines to businesses and ISPs alike—offering pipes as small as a T1 for businesses and as large as OC-3 for Tier 2 service providers.

Backbone differential
Epoch believes that its customer service is what separates it from rivals—primarily telcos and super-regional carriers. Epoch's Service Level Agreement guarantees that it will install each and every circuit within 38 days of the date the order was placed. The ISP also operates under a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee and maintains a five-percent or less packet loss proviso, among other pledges.

According to Paul Hoffmann, Epoch vice president of hosting services, its backbone architecture was designed to deliver high-quality services.

"Almost our whole network uses what is called cold-potato routing, which means the data is kept on our network for as long as it can before it is passed off to another carrier," Hoffmann said. "That way, we can ensure the data we send off is going to get to its destination with as little packet loss as possible."

In order to ensure that data is protected on Epoch's network, engineers use Cisco Systems technology with multi-protocol labels to transport packets at the Level 2 Switching layer rather than Level 3 Routing. Epoch also uses the latest border gateway protocols (BGP4) to maintain its configuration metrics in accordance with its SLAs.

Jerry Grasso, Epoch spokesperson, said when you come right down to it, offering a top-notch product and quality service is what makes Epoch—well, Epoch.

"We differentiate ourselves in that we have Webhosting capabilities and access products that were built completely for our target market, the small- to medium-sized business," Grasso said.

"Our products are the best in class—IBM servers, EMC storage solutions, a Cisco-powered network—but aren't dumbed-down for our client base like those products offered by larger competitors."

All that remains to be seen is how big Epoch can become. It's certain that the company will continued to carve out a solid niche for itself in the carrier and Web hosting markets using its tried and true methods of hard-work and perseverance.

—End