John McHale started his own hub-making business, NetWorth, Inc., ran it
for 10 years, sold it in 1995 for $360 million and retired at 39.
He might still be retired, but he started playing with the Internet and found out - surprise, surprise - it goes too damned slow.
So he started another company to help speed things up using digital subscriber line (DSL) technology that supports multimegabit access over regular phone lines.
Today that company, NetSpeed, Inc., is poised to leave some of the 60 or so other DSL hardware vendors in the dust. NetSpeed sells remote customer-site DSL modems, switching office multiplexers and broadband remote access servers for the customer's central site.
An innovative design that focuses on carry- ing IP traffic gives NetSpeed that edge, according to Larry Burns, manager of outside plant engineering for AllTel Communications, Inc., in Little Rock, Ark., which plans a DSL-based Internet access service based on NetSpeed's gear.
"AllTel is impress-ed that NetSpeed has delivered on products that were little more than plans on paper a year ago and also that Net-Speed is small and focused only on DSL," he says.
"[Big telephone company equipment vendors] have other products and try to mold them into the DSL world, rather than start with a blank sheet and approach the problem from a logical standpoint like NetSpeed did," Burns says.
Also setting NetSpeed apart is Digital Off-Hook technology, which lets carriers share central office modems among several customers by dropping connections when no traffic is passing on the line. DSL hardware from other vendors nails up connections, requiring one central office modem per line.
NetSpeed also has looked ahead to the user who might want more than the 6M bit/sec cap-acity of a single asymmetric DSL line. NetSpeed offers a unique device called SpeedRunner 30, an inverse multiplexer that can fuse three DSL lines together to support 24M bit/sec downloads.
For the corporate customer who will have a staff of remote users tapping into a central site via broadband DSL, NetSpeed has developed a high-capacity remote access server called FireRunner. NetSpeed envisions a telco service that aggregates DSL traffic from multiple remote customer sites and feeds it to the central corporate site on a single broadband link up to 155M bit/sec. FireRunner would handle that single feed and attach to the corporate LAN.
NetSpeed faces competition from some heavy hitters, including Alcatel Data Networks, Inc., which already has a contract to provide modems to four regional Bell operating companies. But NetSpeed has support from established telco-gear maker Northern Telecom, Inc. to integrate NetSpeed technology in Nortel boxes. In combination with NetSpeed's own innovations, that will make a difference.
Look for NetSpeed to land some of the big-gest potential DSL hardware consumers - RBOCs - as they roll out DSL services this year.
