WorldCom's Woes and Your ISP

As financial scandals and restructuring rock the telecommunications industry, anyone who uses a phone or modem might feel nervous. Bankrupt WorldCom is the Internet's largest backbone, routing 28 percent of global traffic and supporting more than 20 million business customers, say Jupiter analysts. (WorldCom is PCWorld.com's ISP and hosting provider.)

That means the odds are high that your ISP relies on WorldCom for some access. Fortunately, the Internet is all about redundancy, and you have little to fear--for now.

"If WorldCom were to go away or go down, we have a plan using multiple providers," says Dan Greenfield, a spokesperson for EarthLink, which has backups through backbone providers Sprint and Level 3. AOL has redundant networks through Genuity, Qwest, and Sprint, says Nicholas Graham, an AOL spokesperson. Neither ISP will say exactly how much it depends on WorldCom. (Both Genuity and Qwest have financial problems too.)

Ironically, redundancy is part of the problem. "The telecom industry easily built 20 times over what is needed," borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars in the process, says Dylan Brooks, a Jupiter senior broadband analyst. Consequently, dozens of telecom firms went bankrupt in the past year, according to TeleGeography.

However, industry analysts do not expect users to encounter even briefly spotty service, as @Home customers experienced last summer when that ISP went under.