Aiming to be an ISP's one-stop shop for everything from dialup access to customer support, CISP offers a broad range of services, all hosted in-house.

by Jeff Goldman [April 23, 2003]

CISP, which stands for "Changing Internet Speed & Performance, " is a spin-off of the telecommunications and data company, Spring Valley Marketing Group. In 1998, Spring Valley created CISP in order to begin working with the search engine company Fast Search & Transfer.

Tom Martin, CISP's President, says the timing of the alliance with Fast Search couldn't have been better. "It was back in the era when if you could say 'technology' and 'IPO' in the same sentence, people threw money to you, " he said. "We became one of Fast's exclusive North American resellers."

CISP Voice: (419) 867-6060 info@cisp.cc

With the funding they acquired for their work with Fast Search, the company built an impressive facility in Ohio. "Here in Toledo, we sit on a true OC-48 fiber ring that runs right through this building," Martin said. "We're triple-redundant in electricity: We have Toledo Edison who supplies to us, we have two 750 kilowatt diesel generators—and the entire building, day-to-day, runs off APC battery arrays."

In 2000, however, the company took over an ISP, and shifted away from the search engine work to refocus their attention on the ISP space. While the OC-48 and redundant power were acquired for the work with Fast Search, Martin points out, they've been an excellent asset for CISP's wholesale dialup and VISP offerings.

Thanks to the quality of their infrastructure, Martin says, they're able to offer a degree of reliability that few others can match. "We have bandwidth coming in this building from four separate providers," he said. "We have an OC-3 with Qwest, an OC-3 with WillTel, six or seven megs from UUNET, and ten megs from Sprint. So our redundancy as far as direct step to the Internet is phenomenal."

Keeping it in-house
CISP offers two levels of service to ISP customers: a basic wholesale ISP program that uses proxy RADIUS pass-through, and a VISP offering called Affinity Advantage. VISP customers receive a broad range of services including dialup access, customized signup pages and signup CDs, customer support and technical support, content filtering, and online account management.

The company aggregates over 16,000 POPs from Qwest, Aleron, UUNET, MegaPOP, and Broadwing. Aside from that, however, CISP doesn't outsource a single piece of its business. For Martin, that's a point of pride. "I don't like depending on anybody," he said. "Even when we use third party software, it's hosted in our NOC, we do all the upgrades, we do all the customization: we control the product."

The same philosophy extends to CISP's servers. "Servers go down: There's no stopping it," Martin said. "So when we set up a RADIUS server, we don't have one: we have three. Our goal is five nines of uptime, and that's five nines of uptime not on our network, but on all of our services."

And it also applies to the company's in-house call center. "We answer 80 percent of our calls in under 30 seconds and we have an over 97 percent answer rate, which is impressive in numbers, " Martin said. "But the important thing to me is, how did we treat that person? Because that's where most call centers fall short."

Martin says his drive to keep everything in-house is all about taking responsibility for his company's services. "People tell me that I'm a bit of a control freak, and I am," he said. "I'm controlling the quality of our product 100 percent. I do not want to depend on someone else."

Matching the market
CISP's aim, Martin says, is to free its ISP customers to focus on marketing. "We are the production and development team for our partner," he said. "We want them to market, to be out there getting us users. I don't make money on setup fees: I want ISPs that produce users. That's where my growth is—and my job is to make sure you don't have churn."

To that end, he makes sure his customers are given the same tools their competitors have. "We give them everything that's out there in the lead market, " Martin said. "Right now you have EarthLink running 'stop the pop-up' ads. We have a toolbar that has that, fully customized and branded. We have an instant messenger that's AOL, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo! compatible, and fully branded."

For the same reason, CISP's portal is extensively customizable. "We took over a portal development company and brought them in-house here, " Martin said. "It's password-protected, which is a big area right now. We know that DSL and cable are coming into the marketplace, but guess what? If I'm an affinity group, I can have them bring their own access and keep the community alive."

Both the ISP and the end user can customize the portal to add or remove specific content. If the ISP requires extensive customization, CISP will do it for free. "Once they make the initial purchase, they don't have to pay for development, " Martin said. "If they want us to change it, they just get it to us by close of business Friday, and on Monday morning, we make the changes for them."

Using CISP's Web Account Management tool, the ISP can view customer information and account data in real time. "It's an open book, " Martin said. "We give our clients real time access to all the services we provide. They can even listen to phone calls—every single call in our call center is recorded—and they can get all of the call stats. It's not done in a report at the end of the month; they can log on and look at everything at any time."

The same access is given to an ISP's end users. "A user can go into their account, and they can change e-mail, they can change passwords, they can look at their billing history, " Martin said. "They can even go in and open up a ticket to our call center right off that site, and one of our techs will respond back via e-mail to help them out."

A one-stop shop
Pricing for the services is negotiable. "If someone called me up with no users, just starting up, they'd be looking at about an $8,000 setup fee that included IM, a dialer, a fully-branded portal, and they're going to look at probably starting at $12, with ramps on usage, " Martin said. "If someone brings me users, I'm negotiating like anyone else."

With the range of services CISP offers, Martin says there's no reason for an ISP customer to charge less than the competition. "Our product can go out and play in the $18-to-21-a-month game, " he said. "I'm not going to do a deal for someone that wants to go out to market at $12.50 a user: You came to the wrong house."

CISP services both wholesale dialup and VISP customers, but Martin says the wholesale offering is there primarily to attract ISP customers who then take on more services as they grow. "A guy starts to put on 20,000 users and he's still doing his own e-mail and his own billing," he said. "What kind of scale does he have to go to in staffing and infrastructure to keep growing? He absolutely can't do it."

At that point, outsourcing to a provider like CISP simply makes sense. "I just spent $160,000 on an EMC storage unit that makes us bulletproof —besides my two Dell SANs that have over two terabytes of storage, " Martin said. "I'm taking snapshots every 15 minutes of everything. We just don't have downtime. How many people can put that infrastructure in?"

And it's also logical to try to work with as few different providers as possible. "Integration is not an easy thing," he said. "You know how many people are out there saying, 'I do my portal and my e-mail over here, my RADIUS guy's here, I'm buying my dial here, my e-mail here?' I would hate to be their call center. But that's the norm." With CISP, he says, it's a lot easier to keep all of those disparate elements under control. "You've got one phone call here and it's to my cell phone, and you get to hear me walk over and find out what the answer is, " Martin said. "We like to consider ourselves the one-stop shop: It's taken some struggles, but I can tell you, it's sure nice doing it."

— End

Related articles:
	[April 18, 2003]	Storage Notes: Every ISP Will Need A Tape Library
	[Dec. 13, 2002]	Intimate Knowledge of RADIUS
	[Oct. 23, 2002]	APC Keeps Your ISP Working

Online resource:
	Wholesale Dialup Directory