Backbone Directory: IDT Corporation

Since its inception in 1990, IDT has become a leading provider of international and domestic long-distance telephone service, Internet access, and global Internet telephony services.

IDT Corporation is a leading facilities-based multinational carrier that provides a broad range of telecommunications services to wholesale and retail customers worldwide. The Company's IDT Ventures division is developing several telecom and Internet-related businesses.

Through its wholly-owned IDT Investments subsidiary, the Company has equity interests in other technology companies, including its former subsidiary, Net2Phone, Inc., which offers a variety of Internet telephony products and services. IDT continues to revamp its free dial-up services via FreeAtLast.com, with limited success.

As of October 1, 2000, IDT had approximately 165 wholesale customers located in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, IDT offers retail long distance services to over 150,000 individual and business customers in the U.S. and worldwide.

IDT's fully redundant clear channel DS3 backbone uses telecom switching technologies that route data traffic with up to 1/1000th the latency of a typical router. IDT's clear channel DS3s are switched, via these units, and provide a stable, secure platform for its Cisco 7500 series routing equipment.

Should any one of its National DS3s fail, data will be switched through a backup fault tolerant path that operates below the IP layer to avoid the large overhead involved in recalculating routed paths, which allows IDT to recover from service disruptions within milliseconds.

IDT's network architecture is based on a minimum hop strategy: Any network node is a maximum of five hops from an Internet meet point. This unique design minimizes packet loss and delay, and guarantees the best possible performance. This topology is unique among major ISPs.

IDT currently peers in four public Internet meet points, (see below). It is here that IDT hands off traffic to and from other large ISPs and over 70 other ISPs who have secured peering arrangements. In addition to draining traffic at public exchanges, IDT also setup mutual private peering arrangements with other large national ISPs.

IDT monitors activities on its backbone with several tools. These tools are a combination of commercially available and proprietary applications developed by Cabletron and its own development staff. These applications provide snapshots of the IDT network every 15 seconds. Engineers monitor overall network stability and bandwidth utilization, which allows IDT to identify "hot-spots" on the network before problems develop.

Domestic interconnection points
[Chicago] Ameritech Chicago NAP
[Pennsauken, NJ] Sprint New York NAP
[San Jose, CA] MAE West
[Washington, DC] MAE East

Corporate contact info
[Corporate Address] 520 Broad Street Newark, NJ 07102
[Voice] (973) 438-4671
[Tollfree] (800) 889-9126
[Sales] Complete Online Form or call (800) 375-7431
[ISP Services] Products
[Executive] Howard Jonas, Chariman and Treasurer
[Financial] Stock exchange symbol: IDTC
[Press Releases] News