Electric Lightwave offers wholesale dialup service covering much of the West Coast, with a focus on efficient and comprehensive support.

by Jeff Goldman [October 26, 2005]

Electric Lightwave (ELI) was founded in 1990, and was acquired by Citizens Communications in 2002; the company is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Citizens. ELI's IP network is one of the largest in the United States, covering more than 4,700 route miles of fiber.

ELI Voice: (888) 354-8780

In 1993, according to company chief technologist Geoff Williams, ELI got the rights from the Washington State Public Utilities Commission to offer dial tone for businesses, and initiated its wholesale dialup offering—called the RSVP (Remote Systems Virtual Portal).

According to Williams, ELI's RSVP dialup coverage reaches most of the West Coast, including major metropolitan areas of Utah, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, most of Arizona, 97 percent of California. It also covers the greater Houston and greater Dallas areas in Texas, and parts of Chicago. And it's only offered on a wholesale basis—ELI doesn't maintain a retail offering that might compete with its ISP clients.

Pricing for the service is structured per port, not per user. "If we were to sell it by user, then we would have to maintain the database of users, and we don't," Williams says. "We allow our customers to maintain their own database, and we simply ask them for access to that database—and then we authenticate that. So they can have as many users as they want, and we don't care what their oversubscription ratio is: that's up to them. It works really well, because then if they want to go to 8:1 or 10:1 or 12:1, that's their business."

Management and support
All RSVP clients have access to RSVP View, a web-based management tool which lets them check port utilization at 15-minute increments. "If it's a relatively new record, they can actually look up who is connected," Williams says. "And it can go in and actually do an analysis of the call, and give them details on signal-to-noise ratio, as well as connect speed, retrains and all of the things that modems have to deal with. It can feed them back an enormous amount of detail."

The company, Williams says, views itself as a boutique player, and manages its support for ISP clients with that approach in mind. "We provide a very high level of service," he says. "Everything is extremely well monitored—we usually know what's going on before anyone else does. We'll even call our customers and tell them that they're going to have a problem, or that they are having a problem, before they know it."

In follow-up calls with customers who call in trouble tickets, Williams says, the company asks them to rate ELI's service on a scale of one to five, five being the best. "Now, keep in mind, these are people that are upset," he says. "And on an ongoing five years, it's been an average of about 4.85. People are satisfied with the company, with the way we take care of them. There's real value in the way we care for our customers."

Organized and responsive
Robert Dinse is the owner of Eskimo North, an ISP based in Shoreline, Washington, which uses ELI to provide dial access in part of its footprint. The ISP also uses an ELI colocation facility for some of its webhosting clients. "ELI, of all the telcos I've dealt with—and I've dealt with a lot of them—has been the most organized and really the most responsive," Dinse says. "Orders have just gone through without problems, generally—and any time we've had technical issues, they got on it right away and resolved them."

Previously, Dinse says, Eskimo North had used Sprint for connectivity. "With Sprint, we had issues with DoS attacks basically making their routers non-functional, and we had high latency to certain networks because of peering problems," he says. "All of those issues we have not had with ELI. The latency's been very low, we've not had our servers taken out by DoS attacks any more—overall, it's just functioned much better for us. They've been very good to work with."

— End

Related articles:
	[updated regularly]	U.S. ISP Subscriber Rankings
	[April 16, 2004]	Logical Net: Growing by Doing Good
	[Dec. 10, 2001]	Billing Systems & Services: Digiquant

Online resource:
	Wholesale Dialup Directory