Get Plugged In On the Road

By Bill Fick

One of the ironies of the global Internet is that most of the Internet Service Provider (ISP) companies which provide dial-up modem access to individual consumers are typically local, serving just a single city or geographic region. This can be inconvenient for frequent travelers who quickly find themselves detached from their e-mail on the road, unless they want to make an expensive long distance call via modem.

The big on-line services such as America On-line (AOL; http://www.aol.com), Compuserve (http://www.compuserve.com), and previously, Microsoft Network (http://www.msn.com) do offer something of a traveling solution, at least for basic electronic mail services. These companies have partnered with Sprint, Infonet, and other global intermediate carriers to provide access to their services via local dial-up telephone numbers around the world. In other words, a Compuserve user in Moscow or Kiev can dial Sprint locally, which patches the connection through to one of Compuserve’s central hosts (and the user’s e-mail box) in Europe or the United States.

However, this approach is far from ideal. Connections over the "secondary" providers, particularly from "remote" parts of the world such as Moscow, tend to be painfully slow and expensive -- up to $30/hour. And even under the best of conditions, the mass-market "McNetworks" pale by comparison to genuine Internet providers for power-users who are accustomed to a full slate of functionality and speed.

Truly "global" access to the McNetwork troika has also developed some serious holes of late. Last autumn, without any warning, MSN overnight announced a "migration to the Internet" and explained that their primary business would be to serve as provider of information rather than access. Users could no longer reach MSN from its global collection of secondary access networks, cutting off many right in the middle of their business trips.

AOL users also suffered when the company closed access from local numbers in Russia due to credit card fraud. While the Russia AOL cutoff generated only a minor ripple across the Russian Internet as a whole, it did inconvenience travelers who enjoyed roaming access to their e-mail.

These events left e-mail via Compuserve as the most obvious choice among business travelers for whom Moscow is an important site on the map. But then a client told me he wasn’t happy with Compuserve’s numeric addresses (1234.567@compuserve.com) because nobody could remember them and correspondents might accidentally send confidential messages to the wrong person due to a typographical error. The task became finding a global network provider which was willing to support a separate Internet domain name for the customer (name@company.com).

Technologically, these requirements do not present a particular challenge, but the McNetworks do not supply such "virtual domain" service. I ultimately found the answer in a sleeping giant, IBM’s Global Network (http://www.ibm.com/globalnetwork/), which simply lacks the notoriety of the popular on-line services like AOL and is targeted to corporate customers rather than the mass market.

On paper, at least, the IBM solution seems to meet all of the necessary criteria, with more than 860 access points worldwide (including Moscow and St. Petersburg) plus domain name registry and support services. And unlike the McNetworks, it is a truly Internet-based system with its own high-speed backbone which does not depend on slow and expensive secondary access systems. Finally and most surprisingly, a $19.95/month individual rate for unlimited use makes it price competitive with the cheapest mass market services – and an unbelievable bargain in Moscow.

IBM does not appear interested in marketing itself as a local ISP in Moscow for individual users. While I don’t know precisely how large their Moscow dial-in modem pool is right now, my guess is that if the word were really to get out the modem pool might be hard pressed to keep up with the demand.

In the near future, industry analysts also expect worldwide telecom giants including Global One, UUNet, and a British Telecom-MCI initiative called Concert to develop global Internet roaming services. Meanwhile, on a more grassroots level, local and regional ISPs are banding together in associations which provide reciprocal access for each other’s users.

Two California companies, AimQuest (http://www.aimsoft.com) and the I-Pass Alliance (http://www.ipass.com) are leading the way in building these ISP coalitions and developing the technology for on-line user authentication, settlement, and clearing systems.

For example, users of a New York ISP which is an I-Pass member could use another I-Pass member network while traveling in Japan, and would be billed automatically through their home provider. Essentially, the technology uses the same principles already employed by automatic teller machines and cellular phone companies.

Industry analysts are divided about whether these associations will be able to compete with the services to be released by the world’s computer and telecomm giants, but for now the market niche for roaming appears to be growing, leaving room for both.

For reliable Internet access in Moscow, your best bet is still probably one of the local ISPs I mentioned in a previous column. But it’s nice to know that you can roam if you want to, all around the world.