Building on its origins as an ISP in Massachusetts, Global NAPs now offers bandwidth services nationwide.

by Jeff Goldman [May 25, 2005]

Global NAPs Networks, Inc. was founded in 1998 as an adjunct to the nationwide CLEC, Global NAPs Inc.—which had itself sprung from the early Massachusetts-based ISP, CENTnet. According to Global NAPs network engineer Dan Benson, Global NAPs' network now offers broad nationwide coverage.

"We buy from AT&T and UUNET in multiple points across the country, and we interconnect these sites with our own SONET equipment— mostly OC-48s to OC-192s, in some cases doing DWDM," Benson says. "And then from that SONET equipment we plug into our Juniper core routers, and we try to connect to all the public peering points across the country, where we usually interconnect with a GigE and do public peering with other carriers."

The vast majority of Global NAPs' bandwidth customers, Benson says, come to the company through its colocation offering. "We don't actively seek new bandwidth customers because the market has gotten so extremely competitive—the bottom has been pretty much blown out," he says. "I would love to grow it at this point, but we don't have 10 to 20 sales guys selling IP all day long—so most of our customers are colocation customers, because they're already onsite with us."

The atmosphere at the company, Benson says, is very loose and flexible, enabling the company to respond quickly to customer requests. "It's a long-term startup type environment," he says. "We try to move as fast as possible. If the customer needs connectivity in a crunch, we really bend over backwards for them."

Service areas
California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia