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IKANO News
Title: With a focus on continuing innovation, IKANO offers private-label wholesale dialup, DSL, and wireless access in addition to a broad range of other services.
Date:March 19th, 2003
URL: www.isp-planet.com http://www.isp-planet.com/equipment/2002/ikano.html
Henry and Doris Smith founded SISNA, a regional ISP, in 1993. Five years later, they created IKANO Communications to offer outsourced, private-label ISP services ranging from dialup access to content filtering. Why IKANO? The word means 'to enable' in Greek.
Henry Smith, now IKANO's CEO, says his motivation to create the company was based on a belief in the power of branding. Given the opportunity to build a product around an established brand or geographic location, he says, ISPs can attract a whole new base of customers. "People get on the Internet with companies that they have some sort of affinity with," Smith said. "That's a different model than your MSNs, EarthLinks, and AOLs."
As a result, everything IKANO offers is branded to the ISP customer. "We do it completely under their name," Smith said. "It's fully integrated with a converged access platform, so the user name and password they use to log on is the same as the user name and password they use to personalize their portal, to gain access to their anti-spam/anti-virus graymail box, and everything else."
Aggregating the aggregators
IKANO's offering includes wholesale dialup, DSL, and wireless access, as well as a range of other services including e-mail, web hosting, a personalized portal, spam filtering, virus prevention, and content filtering. The broad range of services, Smith says, has paid off. "We're the largest VISP provider in the U.S. today," he said. "We service about 600,000 end users on a month-over-month basis, and it grows every month."
The company's network is a key asset. "We have 21 other network aggregators, the Level 3s, the Qwests, the UUNETs, and so on, that everyone else aggregates," Smith said. "In addition, we've built about 700 points of presence in geographic regions they don't service. We're able to deploy more points of presence than anyone else."
IKANO recently began offering an access-only solution, giving ISPs the option of buying wholesale dialup alone, without other VISP services attached. "We determined that we had built such a quality wholesale aggregated network model that we felt it was to our benefit to roll it out as an access-only solution," Smith said.
He says the new option has been a success, with over 125 wholesale dialup-only customers signing up in the last 60 days. "We do it at a less expensive price point than the DialupUSAs and the CISPs, and we give better coverage," Smith said. "In the end, we really focused on price: How do we get the lowest cost for ISPs out there?"
Wholesale dialup customers also get access to IKANO's Mission Control web interface. "They can view their customers' access, where they logged in, any network problems and so forth, all in real time," Smith said. "It's a tool that we built for the VISP customers, and we just brought it back in to the wholesale dial customers."
More services
According to Smith, many of IKANO's customers start with dialup alone, then add other services over time. "You can bundle them any way you want," he said. "We provide RADIUS services, e-mail hosting and delivery services, virtual server hosting, we have our MailRover anti-spam and anti-virus gateway product, and we have our new BrowseBlast web accelerator."
IKANO also offers a range of customer service options. "Our customer care is 24/7, in four different languages," Smith said. "We have about 450 employees, and 300 are customer call center employees. We also have an offering called NETFAQS, non-branded online self-help in Spanish and English which we integrate into portals. It gets over a million page views a month."
Then there's IKANO's private labeled portal offering. "We aggregate content that we pay for—so it's not advertising-based—from 17 different partners," Smith said. "It rides on top of our portal engine, allowing you to personalize your news, weather, sports, everything else. We also have a tool that allows our partners to propagate their own content into the portal."
Finally, IKANO purchased the WiFi Metro assets of hereUare Communications last August, giving them a nationwide network of wireless hotspots which the company recently turned into the HOTSPOTZZ Network. HOTSPOTZZ is integrated with IKANO's dialup access, allowing customers to access HOTSPOTZZ locations with the same user name and password they use for their dialup account.
Pricing for wholesale dialup access starts at $4.45 per month, with a $250 setup fee and a $250 monthly minimum. "If you move up from there, that can go from $6 to $12 or $13 a month, depending on the variety of products you select and just how integrated you make your solution," Smith said.
The challenge for ISPs, Smith says, is to stay ahead of the pack by offering a broad range of value-added services. "Customers are becoming more savvy," he said. "They have to have additional value-added products. If you're not integrating and aggregating, getting better, and continually improving, they're going to find someone else who is."
Always innovating
Tyler Toone is Director of Development for EXOLO Internet Solutions, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. The ISP was founded in February of 2000, and has been working with IKANO from the beginning. "It's been a really good partnership," Toone said. "There's no way we'd have been able to operate without them."
Toone's initial reason for choosing IKANO was very simple: They were just around the corner. "It was nice to be able to go down and talk to them, and get details on how things worked," he said. "From our perspective at that time, they had everything we needed, they were personable, and it was really nice that they were local."
IKANO's services have expanded significantly over the past three years, which Toone says is a great indication of the company's strengths. "Businesses can get to a point where they have their way of doing things, and they don't want to adjust them," he said. "The thing with IKANO is they are extremely innovative."
And according to Toone, Smith's energy drives that innovation for IKANO. "Henry is absolutely incredible," he said. "Every time I talk to him, I learn something new about what IKANO's doing. We get excited about the products as they're coming out, which helps us to sell them to our own customers. It keeps things driving forward, and helps us to stay competitive."
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