Selling high-speed services to people in public places is different than connecting individual residential users—all you need is access to the habitat and the right partner.

by Gerry Blackwell [February 9, 2001]

Transforming your business from ISP to ASP, as we've been discovering, is one feasible strategy for calming customer churn and easing margin pressures on access and other traditional services.

But application services are only one potential source of new revenue. And why stop at just locking in the customers you already have?

Santa Clara CA-based Atreus System Corp. believes there is a larger opportunity for ISPs—offering broadband services, of all kinds, to customers in multi-tenant units (MTUs).

High-speed hangouts
Multi-tenant units include office buildings, apartment and condo developments and hotels.

Of course, Atreus has a vested interest in the notion. It sells the xLINK Broadband Service Creation Platform, a suite of software modules designed to help get service providers up and running quickly offering sophisticated IP-based services such as managed security, voice over DSL (VoDSL), applications and video.

"If you're a [traditional] ISP," says Atreus co-founder and president Doug Bellinger, "you've got two choices—you can be the low-cost guy or the better-features-and-services guy. If you're trying to move up the value chain and offer more services, then you need software like ours."

Even if you want to stay in the dial-up space, adding services is the only rational way to go, Bellinger argues, and you'll still need a solid platform on which to build those new service offerings. "It's just that the range of services available to you to offer if you have high-speed, always-on connections is much greater."

Ordinary interests
The beauty of the MTU market is that the end-users share a common network infrastructure so they cost less individually to install. They also often have a common set of interests, which makes it easier to bundle packaged services for which they'll be likely to pay a premium.

The MTU market is projected to grow fast. According to a May 2000 report from San Jose CA-based Cahners In-Stat Group, revenues from IP-based services to MTUs will go from $211.4 million in 2000 to $1.3 billion in 2003.

Do you need a platform like xLINK to tackle this market?

Bellinger points out that legacy operations support systems (OSSs) typically limit the number of services for which ISPs can separately bill, and the flexibility with which they can configure services to suit customers' and partners' needs. xLINK doesn't

Keeping track of which customers should have access to premium services, how services are to be routed, how they're charged for, how service partners like ASPs are compensated and so on is all determined by "policies."

And the Atreus platform, unlike legacy OSSs and some more up-to-date competitors' products, allows service providers to establish a virtually unlimited number of policies and policy attributes.

One thing xLINK does is aggregate billing information. So even if the legacy billing system limits the number of inputs, service providers can aggregate using xLINK and still bill for many different services.

Background processing
Atreus also sells bundles of "service drivers," one bundles for each of the three different segments of the MTU market—office, residential and hospitality. Each service driver enables a specific service. Some are particular to one market segment, some, like DNS, are common to all.

Go to page 2: The Tantalizing MTU Market—continued