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INTERNET CONNECTION
Dot-bomb economy doesn't hurt Bucks ISP COURIER TIMES
By Rebecca M.B. Pearson
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An Upper Southampton Internet Service Provider promises its customers that they'll never get a busy signal when they dial up, nor will they get kicked off the system if they're on too long.
Those two guarantees helped Quadnet get an edge over others, garnering it an endorsement last June by the University of Pennsylvania to provide Internet service to the Ivy League school's off-campus students, faculty, staff and alumni.
Since that endorsement, the 5-year-old ISP has landed two other significant deals - the University of Pennsylvania hospital in February 2001 and an exclusive endorsement from WebStudy, an Internet-based online learning company, in March.
Each of Quadnet's three partners credit its success to tenacity and "holding together no matter how bad times got," said co-partner Paula Berenholz.
A perfect example is how the company landed the Penn endorsement.
"We'd heard Penn was shopping around for an independent ISP to offer its off-campus students," said Berenholz.
Since the company was relatively unknown, it advertised itself by hanging up posters on student bulletin boards and handing out flyers outside the campus. One of the school's technology staff members picked up the flyer and invited Quadnet to compete for the school's business along with 28 other ISPs.
"They put our systems through rigorous testing," Berenholz said.
Most ISPs log off a user after 10 minutes of inactivity. Some ISPs can also kick off a user even during activity if it thinks the user's been online for too long.
Quadnet's automatic log-off is four hours of inactivity, which means so long as the user moves a mouse, clicks, scrolls or types, the systems won't disconnect.
"If a student is taking an exam from home and he or she gets disconnected in the midst of it, that can present problems," Berenholz said. "They worry about whether they've just spent two hours for nothing, if the exam is lost or if they have to retake the test."
During exam time, the company doubles its live tech support personnel for students, realizing that's when they need help the most. The company has an academic rate of $12.50 per month. For non-Penn subscribers, it's $13.99 monthly, with discounts for prepaid packages.
"That's for unlimited access and no banner ads," said Rosemarie Hasson, Quadnet's vice president of sales and marketing.
Quadnet has local access numbers covering the five Greater Philadelphia counties - Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, Delaware, and Philadelphia counties. Next month, local access will be available in South Jersey and northern Delaware.
The company started out in 1989 building custom PCs and networks for specialized industries, such as the department of defense.
"We were the first to ship computers to Kuwait after the gulf war in 1989," Thompson said.
But when hardware became fiercely competitive and margins thinned, the company became a computer school providing Internet-related classes.
"When people started asking us which ISP they should sign up, we would refer them to a competitor. So I decided to offer our own," Thompson said. That was in 1996.
Quadnet's partners say they could have sought venture capital to expand their operations. But they're glad they didn't. Today many of Quadnet's competitors, among them DirectWeb, and Libertynet, have ceased to provide ISP services because of their dependency on venture capitalist funding.
"We didn't fall for the Euphoria," said Chris Thompson, Quadnet's president. "During the explosion we stayed the course."
Wednesday, August 29, 2001
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