A Net Evangelist Spreads the Word

With more than 21,000 corporate customers worldwide, PSINet Inc. is one of the world's largest and most experienced Internet service providers. PSINet Japan, the company's first international subsidiary, was established in October 1993. For more information about PSINet, go to http://www.psi.net/ or http://www.jp.psi.net/English/Welcome.html.

Jeffrey Shapard is senior product manager (and "general Internet evangelist") for PSINet. For several years, until 1993, he was "sysop" of TWICS, the Tokyo-based online communications service.

interviewed by Wm. Auckerman

How is the corporate Internet market changing?

Shapard: The nature of the customers has started to change over the past year or so, from companies that really want to be out there on the leading edge with the latest technology, to more mainstream companies who are still a little bit nervous about this "Internet thing." They'd just as soon not have to deal with it, but they're increasingly aware that if they don't, they'll be left behind.
[Also,] there is very strong interest in the use of Internet technology within corporate networks: the so-called "intranet boom."

I've seen conflicting definitions of just what constitutes an intranet. How do you define it?

Shapard: An intranet is the use of Internet technology for a private corporate network. Basically, it's another way to say "enterprise network," except an enterprise network can use any kind of protocol, whereas an intranet typically refers to the use of IP [Internet protocol]-based applications.

What is an "extranet," and where does that fit into the picture?

Shapard: An extranet is what you call an intranet when you're late to market. [laughs]

Seriously, as you start to get into more complex virtual business groupings - if you're trying to create a private network connecting different organizations - you get into more complex zones of security. "Extranet" is the buzzword that's used to refer to that. It's really an intranet with differing zones of access and security. How would you characterize the Japanese Internet market?

Shapard: Japan has a supply glut; there are more providers than the market can really bear. But my feeling is that most of the providers aren't serious; they're not real. Every manufacturing company, every computer company, every telephone company seems to feel that they have to be in this business somehow. So they take their WAN [wide area networking] group, and spin it off as an ISP [Internet service provider]. And they sign up maybe 20 or 30 corporate customers, mostly within their own business group, but that's about as far as they go.

On the other hand, the market here really hasn't been scratched. There's enormous potential. Most companies in Japan don't even have LANs [local area networks] yet. They're just starting to crawl out of the 1950s and use computers.

How has the Internet affected Japanese business processes?

Shapard: Very little. In Japan, the biggest boom in Internet interest has been in the Web, because it's visual. In terms of business automation, actual office productivity, Japanese companies are somewhere in the late 1950s. Japanese efficiency in manufacturing is renowned, but back office efficiency lags seriously.

Will shortage of bandwidth ever be a problem for the Internet?

Shapard: One of the big myths of the Internet is that bandwidth is somehow some kind of big constraint. But bandwidth is not really very relevant.
Basically, the determining factor of Internet performance isn't bandwidth; it's packet loss. The only time bandwidth is really the limiting factor is if you have what we call "chronic packet loss" - when you have a small provider with a 64K link, and 2,000 customers all hitting porno sites, in which case the connection is totally maxed out. But when you start getting into T3 lines, typically they'll be running at maybe 15% capacity... to have room for the "burst" transmissions.

So, if the solution isn't more bandwidth, what's the key to being a successful ISP?

Shapard: The Internet is more about managing routers and the topology of the network - and the queues, the buffers, the switches - than it is about bandwidth. Some of the providers who over the past few months have had the most significant performance problems and network reliability problems have been telephone companies. They have all the bandwidth in the world, and yet their networks keep crashing.
The Internet is about IP, it's about shared business automation, it's about e-mail and Web services and groupware. The folks who believe that the Internet is about bandwidth should get out of the business immediately. If they're right, we're all dead, because the telephone companies can win that game hands down.