December 28, 2000, 4:06 PM — WHEN IT COMES to data, Paul Mockapetris has a need for speed. Best known as a creator of DNS (Domain Name System), Mockapetris has spent his professional life pushing the envelope in technologies that hasten the delivery of information.
So it is only fitting that now, as CTO of Urban Media, he spends his working hours devising ways to deliver broadband to small and midsize businesses for free.
Urban Media is taking the classic loss leader approach to business. The idea is that, once customers have whet their Internet appetite on the free 200Kbps access Urban Media serves to each desktop, they will be hungry for additional goodies from the on-site service provider.
"By giving away basic service, we believe we are tripling the market," Mockapetris says. "We may be crazy, but we're hoping we're crazy like a fox."
The Palo Alto, Calif., company's menu of pay services includes local and long-distance voice, managed e-mail, videoconferencing, and VPNs. Through partners, the company offers a grab bag of business services including travel arrangements, office equipment and supplies, insurance, payroll, and accounting.
Of course, along with a handful of competitors, Urban Media faces critics who question whether the giveaway will make dollars and sense.
That's just fine with Mockapetris. The 52-year-old is attracted to enterprises that buck conventional wisdom. "It's always been my philosophy that the absolute best place to be is in a business you believe works but one where other people are skeptical," he says.
Mockapetris co-founded the company with two former colleagues from Internet access service @Home Network. Those colleagues are Sean Doherty, chief executive officer of Urban Media, and Atam Lalchandani, the chief financial officer. @Home merged with Excite last year.
Ironically, Urban Media is getting its start two floors up from the Palo Alto office space that nurtured the early days of @Home, which also promised to deliver broadband to a new set of customers -- but through cable.
In several respects the approaches between the two companies are similar. "At @Home, we were combining the rights to deliver service across a lot of cable companies," Mockapetris says. "Here we are combining the rights to deliver service across a lot of building owners."
Urban Media has already signed up several large property management companies, including Dallas-based Trammell Crow. Urban Media expects to be in 30 markets by the end of the year, company officials say.
As CTO, Mockapetris oversees the development of the company's "fiber-to-the-floor" architecture. Typically, Urban Media brings a T3, a 45Mbps fiber-optic pipe, into a building and splits up the capacity among the tenants' offices.
"People are really starting to apply ASIC and fiber-optic technology to equipment that can go into these [office] spaces, which I think is going to make the prospect of large-scale, widespread broadband a reality," the CTO says.
In the ever-changing world of technology, one of this CTO's most difficult tasks is selecting the right hardware and software to deploy today with an eye on company choices for tomorrow. We have to "make sure we're not building ourselves into obsolescence," he says.
