urbanSTL

LOCAL INTERNET HUB MAY SPEED UP WEB, E-MAIL
Monday, 6/10/1996
By Denise Smith Amos\Of The Post-Dispatch Staff
Meet me on St. Louix, Louix, meet me on the Net.
That could make a catchy rallying cry for Data Research Associates Inc. and Starnet LLC. They are two Internet service providers trying to organize St. Louis' first local hub, which they are calling StlouIX. DRA is a publicly traded Olivette company that sells computer systems and Internet access mostly to libraries, linking them through the Internet.
Last year it had sales of $35 million. It employs 200 people.
Starnet is a three-person Internet operation hatched at Washington University but spun off into a private entity in 1994. It primarily provides Internet access to 200 of St. Louis' largest companies and last year generated revenue exceeding $1 million. It also is based in Olivette.
There are about 30 companies like DRA and Starnet, each offering Internet access to businesses and homes in the St. Louis area through their own network or bank of modems. So far, about 38 percent of St. Louis' businesses and several thousand area homes have Net access.
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The Internet is a loose collection of computer networks spanning the globe. Most people use the Net for e-mail or to surf the World Wide Web - an always-open realm of computer archives and data sites bearing video, audio, text, and computer programs for all or for specially selected computer users.
Anyone who compares the Net to the phone system is simplifying things, said Joe Bonwich, a DRA vice president. When people make long-distance phone calls, their local phone company connects with a national one through a system of exchanges. Then that national company connects with the local company of the person being called. But someone making a local call won't trigger those exchanges because each local phone company's equipment talks to each other's.
The Internet isn't that logical yet, Bonwich said. Most of its local service providers don't link up with each other directly because they are competitors. Instead, they send each message, regardless of its destination, out onto the Internet - like a caller in Clayton having his or her call patched through AT&T's Atlanta office before it reaches its destination in Ladue.
Nevertheless, there are only eight or nine points on the Internet networks accessed by St. Louis where local Net companies intersect. Those points, called Internet Exchange Points, are mostly on the East and West coasts.
So an e-mail message in Creve Coeur must go to San Francisco before it can land in Olivette. "If I wanted to look at DRA's home page right now, I'd be going from here to Kansas City, to Willow Springs somewhere, to Chicago and back to St. Louis, " said Chris Myers, Starnet's president.
The farther away data must travel on the Internet and the more networks it must jump, the greater the chance it won't make it to the computer at the other end. In fact, about 4 percent of computer messages transmitted via the Net get lost on the way.
[snip]
If DRA and Starnet are successful in establishing StlouIX (pronounced "Saint Lou-ix"), sending e-mail or logging onto a St. Louis-based Web site could be faster and easier for you and cheaper for service providers.
But the providers must first voluntarily link with StlouIX, a tricky process because service providers often don't trust their competition enough to rely on them to act as the center point for the exchange, said Bonwich at DRA.
"The more (Internet service) providers are connected to it, the more likely things will move faster across town, " he said. Even if only four of the remaining 30 Internet providers join StlouIX, though, they all should save thousands of dollars in monthly access fees that they won't have to pay the major national and international Internet network providers, such as MCI and Sprint.
And St. Louis would in fact have its own hub right here.

innov8ion wrote:^ AT&T doesn't charge St. Louis to roll out its fiber infrastructure. Therefore, I don't understand how your article relates. Google's business model requires a faster, more robust, and cheaper internet for the masses to enable further growth. I don't see Google seriously entering the fiber market but kudos to them if their experimentation spurs more competition.