The acronym ISP (Internet service provider) is going into everyday American conversation right along with such standbys as FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation and CTA (Chicago Transit Authority).
People know them so well that you really don’t need to add the parenthetical explanation unless bound to do so in formal writing.
Cocktail party small talk now includes asking someone, “So, who’s your ISP?”
To which they might reply, “AOL” (America Online Inc.) or “MSN” (Microsoft Network), both huge nationwide computer dial-up services. Or they might say “Ameritech,” since the Midwestern phone giant became an ISP earlier this year.
Or they might come back with the initials of one of a number of suddenly flourishing, although smaller, Chicago-based firms, including “MCS” (Macro Computer Solutions Inc.), “AIS” (American Information Systems Inc.) “WWA” (World Wide Access by Computing Engineers Inc.) or “InterAccess”(InterAccess Co.).
These four companies share a common model. Each hung out a shingle in cyberspace during 1993 while working out of private homes or small storefronts.
In nearly four frantic but flourishing years since, each has grown into a business with revenues in the millions, work forces in the dozens and offices in pricey downtown Chicago locations.
They flourish because an ISP like AIS, MCS, WWA or InterAccess is one’s link to e-mail.
Once an ISP is selected for e-mail, it becomes part of one’s public persona. It goes on one’s business card and at the top of stationery, adding lines to the boilerplate such as “jcoates@mcs.com.” or “jcoates1@aol.com” or “jcoates@ais.net ” or “jcoates@interaccess.com” or “jcoates@ameritech.net.”
Likewise, the ISP becomes one’s line to the World Wide Web. One logs on to an address like “www.mcs.com” or “www.ais.net” to pick up on the latest information.
Other than an e-mail address, which is as common as a telephone number in growing circles of American business, having access to the World Wide Web increasingly becomes an essential workaday tool.
A journalist calls Skokie-based U.S. Robotics Corp. asking for the latest press release and is told, “check it out at our web site, www.usr.com,” pronounced “double u, double u double u dot USR dot com.”
A salesperson calls a department store trying to sell novelty items and is told “go to our Web site and fill out a form.”
As Internet expertise grows among the general public, individuals create Web pages of their own. People with an ISP use software called a “browser” on their personal computers to call up each Web page by typing in those addresses.
Ameritech now includes in its $20 per month ISP fee the ability to set up a Web page featuring a subscriber’s resume complete with photo and work samples. A prospective employer can be given one’s Web page address in lieu of a printed resume.
Likewise, businesses small and large find posting a Web page a cheap form of advertising and sometimes even a way to get people to actually order and buy things.
Karl Denninger, chief executive of Chicago’s longest running ISP, MCS, said, “We are in a very, very competitive industry where having fast, reliable and affordable Internet access is very, very important to our customers.
Lost e-mail, he noted, means lost business opportunities. If your Web site is on an overwhelmed computer, customers can’t call it up to see your sales pitch or buy your wares.
Denninger started MCS in a Belmont Avenue storefront, spending nearly every working hour “building out” the hardware complex that has become his bread and butter and responding by pager day and night to technical support calls.
Now his hardware is hooked into the Internet from a suite in the Prudential Building, where Denninger and a staff of 20 serve more than 10,000 subscribers and hundreds of Web pages posted by corporate clients.
Thus MCS, AIS, WWA and InterAccess all focus much of their capital investments and intellectual resources in what amounts to the plumbing that makes the Internet flow.
The companies are in downtown buildings because they offer easy access to the high-speed fiber-optic telephone network that is called the “backbone” of the Internet.
In essence, each company plugs its computers into this ultra-fast worldwide communications backbone and then lets its customers access the Internet. This is done either by making an ordinary phone call using a modem or by other, and more costly, means the ISPs sell as part of their packages.
In interviews with the chief executives of MCS, AIS, WWA and InterAccess, each said they have somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 ordinary dialup accounts along with several hundred customers using expensive telephone equipment called ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network).
In addition to selling this access, the companies also offer services to help businesses of all sizes set up and maintain Word Wide Web sites using their equipment.
Michael Hakimi, chief financial officer of AIS, which has moved into a sprawling suite in the new building at 161 N. Clark Street, gave a tour of his “server farm” in an air-conditioned, equipment-jammed room in which such companies as Sara Lee Corp., U.S. Robotics, Blue Mountain Greeting Cards Inc. and even Ameritech rent computer space to hold their Web sites.
“We fancy ourselves as the city’s most full-service ISP,” said Gary Tarr, chief executive of AIS. “We provide everything from copper wire dialup on the low end to high-speed fiber connections for Fortune 500s at the high end. We design sites, we host sites and we keep those sites going around the clock,” he added.
By contrast, WWA, which has offices on two floors in the Civic Opera high rise at 20 N. Wacker Dr., focuses more on keeping its large list of business clients with reliable Internet links while the clients themselves do the actual Web page designing.
WWA chief executive Dave Vrona, who started the company in his Vernon Hills home in 1993 with a partner, Gregory Gulik, said WWA pays particular attention to providing sophisticated corporate clients with reliable high-speed links.
But, like all the others, individual dialup accounts remain a large part of the business, with more than 10,000 Chicago-area computer-users signed on as WWA subscribers.
The company that focuses the most strongly on this mass audience is InterAccess, which operates out of two floors of a huge loft building at 168 N. Clinton St., just behind Union Station.
“We have been the pioneer in things like helping ordinary people get access to the powers of the Internet with products like our `plug and play’ system from the very beginning,” said Tom Simmonds, chief executive of InterAccess.
Simmonds started the company from his Northbrook home in 1993 with a $50,000 loan from his father, a north suburban manufacturing executive, and now enjoys status as the largest local provider of consumer ISP accounts with more than 15,000 subscribers.
One of InterAccess’s strong points, Simmonds noted, is that it focuses on users of Macintosh personal computers more than the others do. The company also offers new customers an easy-to-use software package called “Plug and Play Internet” that comes on a CD-ROM.
Simmonds, who confessed to getting snagged for more than an hour himself while recently trying to set up an ISDN connection in his home, added, “This stuff still isn’t easy enough, but we do our best to make it as easy as it can be.”
