NaviPath Quietly Closes Door On Dialup

Deciding not to notify its customers, NaviPath intends to shut down its network at the end of September—passing along its unlucky wholesale ISP clients to other providers.

by Jim Wagner of internetnews.com [September 20, 2001]

Wholesale dial up provider NaviPath is going out of business at the end of the month while scores of Internet service providers are finding out about its decision this week—from outside sources.

It's still not clear whether the CMGI-owned company is going completely out of business or just eliminating one of many divisions within the aggregate provider's purview. The company also peddles its network infrastructure and value-added services to ISPs. There is no word whether these services would fall by the wayside or not.

Mum's the word
NaviPath officials, namely Steve Smitht, director of wholesale access services, refused repeated requests for information about the extent of the service termination or if NaviPath would shutter its doors for good. The company's public relations firm, Sterling Hager, Inc., also did not return repeated telephone calls. ISPs attempting to reach the company through its Web site discovered that the phone number no longer works.

The e-mails started going out Monday to ISPs from another wholesale provider, YourNetPlus.com. It seems Level 3, a global network carrier, was recently contacted by NaviPath officials to take over its dialup operations.

While Level 3 agreed to take some of the ISPs onto their network, their eligibility criteria left out many of the smaller providers around the U.S. All told, somewhere around 400 ISPs might lose access to NaviPath POP servers that their far-flung customers depend upon—as soon as the end of this month.

Come on over
Bill Calamia, YourNetPlus executive vice president, said his company was more than willing to pick up the 400 potential ISP clients from Level 3.

"I was on the phone with NaviPath, and I remember them telling me they were sending all their ISPs for Level 3 to pick up," Calamia said. "I said that if Level 3 didn't want them, we'd take the ones that they didn't want. (NaviPath) did make the effort to make sure their customers weren't left without a network at the end of the month."

To handle the influx of new ISP customers, YourNetPlus is adding approximately 1,700 NaviPath POP server numbers from Level 3, bringing its total to more than 5,300 dialup numbers for local access. Calamia boasts that YourNetPlus' footprint is nearly as large as that of network giant UUNet.

Spurned technology
Citing the need for improved dialup connections, NaviPath embarked on a nationwide upgrade of its dialup servers to adopt v.92 standards in support of v.44 modems earlier this year. The chipset enhancements were a definite upgrade from v.90 modem standards, but were met with little enthusiasm from ISP owners.

NaviPath, owned by CMGI and backed by stockholders from Compaq and Lucent Technologies, has been a relatively quiet player in the wholesale dialup service segment. While competitors like MegaPOP, Broadwing, and FlexPOP continued to build out their network of broadband coverage, NaviPath took the road less traveled. When its comes to best business practices, NaviPath has managed to blaze a new trail, all its own.

— End