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Chris Chapel

CORPORATE Internet users and service providers will be the main target markets for the new regional high-speed Internet backbone to be launched by the Asia Internet Holdings (AIH) consortium.

  The backbone, with hubs in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore, promises to eliminate the need for Asian Internet users to communicate via the United States.

   The consortium includes Hong Kong SuperNet, Singapore-based Pacific Internet, controlled by the Sembawang group, and two Japanese companies - Sumitomo Corp and Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ.)   The four partners are putting an equal investment into the US$6 million venture but early customers will be also be offered a share in the business, according to Professor Eugene Wong, vice-president for research and development at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST,) which owns Hong Kong SuperNet.

 'It will really be quite an open consortium, but the four general partners will probably manage the consortium for some time to come,' Prof Wong said.

  He said the backbone would eliminate the 'unnecessary cost and congestion in trans-Pacific links' caused by the need to route traffic through the US.

  Sembawang chairman Philip Yeo will be chairman of the new consortium but day-to-day running will be in the hands of IIJ chief executive Kouchi Suzuki.

  AIH will be incorporated in Japan next month, and will have its headquarters in Tokyo, the main network hub. The Tokyo hub will connect to the US via high speed T3 links and there will be regional hubs in Hong Kong and Singapore.

  The consortium's effective backbone will stretch from northern Japan down to Singapore.

  It will target companies seeking to set up their own virtual private networks and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) around the region, particularly those in countries currently without access to the Internet.

 Between them, the AIH partners already have much of the network in place, but there are still gaps to fill, according to Prof Wong.

   He said AIH was working out the optimum network based on tariffs among the various telecoms providers involved.

 'There is still a lot of artificiality in the tariff structure so obviously one has to abide by that, but we will be servicing the natural clusters of countries around Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong.'   Supernet would retain its role as an ISP in Hong Kong and would encourage other ISPs to join the Asia backbone, Mr Wong said.

  Mr Wong, who was involved in setting up the National Science Foundation's US backbone in the early days of the Internet, said information providers would probably be another major revenue source: 'These backbones take on lives of their own once they get going.'   The AIH backbone will be a profit-making venture, like SuperNet, which is part of the HKUST's for-profit research and development arm.

  The AIH partners said the new backbone would 'expand the commercial uses of the Internet tremendously in the region'.

 According to Prof Wong, IIJ 'probably has the greatest penetration of the corporate market [in its home market] of any ISP in the world.

 'They really developed the concept of virtual private network,' for companies, he said.

   Prof Wong said AIH would be a one-stop-shop for companies seeking to set up virtual private networks linking all their Asian manufacturing bases.

  'A lot of manufacturers in Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore have fairly widely distributed manufacturing facilities in Asia. So it is important for them, instead of going to seven different ISPs, to be able to go to one for turn-key solutions.'   Prof Wong said: 'The immediate objective is to allow intra-Asian traffic to be routed within Asia without having to go overseas. It will also provide a common medium for linkage to the Internet for all ISPs, especially for ISPs in countries that currently don't have service.'   AIH would offer economies of scale, uniform standards and flexible bandwidth choice.

  For the ISPs, the main advantage would be the ability to piggy back on a set of high speed lines without the need to negotiate links.

  AIH would offer a simple alternative for a country joining the Internet for the first time, Prof Wong said. 'They just go to the nearest [AIH] touchdown point and that's it. Instead of arranging for a circuit, touch-down in the US, arranging for a local ISP in the US and arranging for some exchange in the US to route their traffic, they have a one stop shop.'   Other groups, notably AT&T and IBM have also launched Internet services aimed at the corporate market, but Prof Wong said AIH was in an advantageous position because it had an Asia-specific focus while the others did not.

  A new service launched by AT&T last week, however, is geared towards a backbone with an Asian focus.



Backbone to connect Asia