Northpoint Communications First Data CLEC To Offer Full-duplex T1 Speeds Over DSL; Company Extends NorthPoint DSL Service To Support Higher Speeds, Longer Reach

Business Wire, Oct 19, 1998

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 19, 1998--NorthPoint Communications, Inc.(SM), a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) specializing in high-speed data transport, announced today two new service offerings under its NorthPoint DSL(SM) umbrella.

For the first time, national, regional, and local network service providers (NSPs) who partner with NorthPoint can purchase full-duplex T1-speed transport - 1.544 Mbps upstream and downstream - at wholesale prices that are significantly lower than conventional T1 services available from incumbent carriers. In addition to a low monthly rate of $250, compared with legacy T1 rates of $350-$600 per month, NorthPoint's business-quality T1-speed services are backed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) guaranteeing 99.99 percent packet delivery and a round-trip latency of 10 milliseconds (ms) through the NorthPoint network.

Today, NorthPoint also introduced a new IDSL service offering, providing up to 144 kbps of symmetric connectivity at distances up to 36,000 feet from the central office. NorthPoint's IDSL service is fully compatible with any local loop supporting ISDN's Basic Rate Interface (BRI), including lines with digital loop carrier (DLC) systems or ISDN repeaters. In addition, NorthPoint IDSL is compatible with leading ISDN modems and routers, such as Cisco, Copper Mountain, and Netopia, allowing existing ISDN customers to migrate DSL with minimum effort and expense.

With these new service enhancements and NorthPoint's recently announced rollouts in major metropolitan areas across the U.S., NorthPoint now supports the broadest range of business-quality symmetric service offerings, and the broadest coverage, of any Data CLEC in the industry.

"NorthPoint gives its NSP partners a clear path for differentiation," said Mike Borsetti, director of product management at NorthPoint. "We support dedicated, symmetric transport from 144 kbps to 1.544 Mbps, the right set of services to appeal to the broadest range of business customers. We wholesale our services in the most lucrative markets in the country - 10 major metro areas by year's end, with 14 more targets already identified for the first three quarters of 1999. Finally, our SLAs give partners the ability to increase their revenues with robust support of applications like videoconferencing, voice over IP, and virtual private networking."

"This type of competitive service offering is what the Telecommunications Act was designed to stimulate," said Berge Ayvazian, executive vice president of the Yankee Group (Boston, Mass.). "While many naysayers are complaining about the failure of the Telecom Act, NorthPoint is delivering innovation - and choice - in the local loop."

A Full Spectrum of Service Offerings

"NorthPoint's solution enables @Work to offer its customers a broad array of access solutions that adjust to their business needs and budget requirements," said Steve Reichgut, DSL product manager for @Work. "Leveraging the advantages of NorthPoint's DSL services and @Work's distributed broadband architecture, small to medium sized businesses will have an affordable and robust solution to enhance their communications and business presence through the Internet."

With this announcement, NorthPoint now offers data transport services at the following speeds: 144 kbps, 160 kbps, 200 kbps, 416 kbps, 784 kbps, 1.04 Mbps, and 1.544 Mbps. Users can choose an entry-level service and easily migrate to higher speeds; in most cases, NorthPoint can upgrade users electronically, without any site visit. NorthPoint DSL is based on proven line encoding used in over a half million installed lines. Its two-way symmetric bandwidth satisfies business-critical needs and supports the full spectrum of today's "push" and "pull" enterprise applications, including extranets, virtual private networks (VPNs), electronic commerce, Web hosting, videoconferencing, multimedia and more.

NorthPoint uses equipment from Copper Mountain Networks to deliver its family of DSL services nationwide. "NorthPoint is the first Copper Mountain customer to take advantage of the full gamut of DSL services supported by the CopperEdge 200 Access Concentrator," said Bryan Long, vice president of marketing at Copper Mountain. "We designed the CopperEdge with a clear vision of our target customers: competitive carriers building a portfolio of high-performance, business-focused services that can be rapidly deployed at low entry cost and high rate of return. NorthPoint is a textbook case study of the fruits of that vision."

Service Availability

NorthPoint offers the full complement of its NorthPoint DSL services in all of its metropolitan service regions. Customers can order NorthPoint DSL services from NSPs today in the San Francisco Bay Area (including Silicon Valley), the greater Los Angeles area, Boston, New York, Chicago, San Diego, and Washington D.C. By year's end, the service will also be available in Dallas, Detroit and Houston. NorthPoint plans to expand to 14 additional metropolitan markets by the third quarter of 1999 and to continually extend coverage within existing metropolitan service areas.