With a global footprint and an impressive history, UUNET offers one of the largest networks available worldwide.

by Jeff Goldman [July 23, 2003]

UUNET was founded back in 1987 as the first business ISP with a backbone network. In 1995, the company became a subsidiary of WorldCom, now MCI. According to Craig Venable, UUNET's Director of Wholesale Sales, the ISP services group at UUNET dates back to the company's earliest days, now serving prominent ISPs ranging from MSN to AOL.

Within MCI, the UUNET brand now handles the company's wholesale services, targeting service providers of all kinds. "In our segment, we have well over 100 customers, from AOL down to folks who have five or ten thousand subscribers on our network," Venable said. "We work with customers of all sizes."

UUNET Voice: (800) 494-5629 wholesale-solutions@mci.com

Most of UUNET's ISP customers, Venable says, do exceed 5,000 users or so. "We don't have a floor below which we won't do business, but some of the smaller ones do choose to do business with an aggregator," he said. "An aggregator might leverage the usage from a large number of ISPs to get a better deal from us than someone who has, say, 5,000 users can get directly."

A global network
UUNET's dial network includes over 1,700 POPs in the United States, and over 4,000 worldwide. "We are in over 80 countries," Venable said. "One of the reasons why many folks want to utilize our network is because of our reach. With the amount of travel and international business that customers do, having global access is important. That's one of the considerations we've seen in talking to customers recently."

Domestic coverage, Venable adds, is equally important to most potential customers. "To the best of our knowledge, we still have the most significant presence in the U.S. of any dial access provider," he said. "We continue to provide service in a lot of geographies where our competitors just aren't, and that's important."

Upgrading the network is a priority: Venable says the plan is to have v.92 implemented on the entire dial access network by the end of the year after a gradual rollout. "We've gone through an extensive process to ensure that we've stayed as up to date as possible and been market driven," he said. "We are investing and augmenting where we need to, based on demand."

Service, Venable says, is also a key priority for UUNET, with a focus on direct relationships with ISP customers. "We offer a full suite of support staff for anybody who signs up for our service," he said. "They really appreciate having static individuals that they can call specifically to handle issues with their accounts."

Online administration
ISPs that choose to work directly with UUNET gain access to a fully branded online interface. "It gives them a good view, on a POP-by-POP basis, of what's going on with their actual user base: what kind of average time on the network their users are putting on, how much usage on a per-POP basis is happening, and where there are issues on the network," Venable said.

The purpose of the interface, he says, is to give the ISP a greater sense of ownership. "It's an easy way to aggregate a lot of information about our network at their fingertips," Venable said. "At the end of the day, the ISP that we work with takes our network and brands it as their own, and so we want them to feel as much as possible that it's their network."

Pricing is available under a number of different models, including per-hour and per-subscriber. "We do look at every opportunity on a case by case basis," Venable said. "We try not to fit our potential customers into a mold, so we've been very flexible. Various customers have different needs, and we try and take those into consideration."

In spite of the attention that's been focused on WorldCom and MCI recently, Venable says most customers recognize that UUNET has an enormous amount to offer. "We have gone through a lot in the last six to nine months, but ultimately, our customers come to us because we are a stable organization, and we've been providing dial access for longer than any other competitor out there," he said

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Related articles:
	[July 15, 2002]	UUNet Ripe for the Picking
	[July 5, 2002]	ISPs React to WorldCom's Demise
	[May 1, 2002]	Ebbers Leaves WorldCom

Online resource:
	Wholesale Dialup Directory