Want to Be an ISP?

Quality Service?

For these niche sites and organizations, offering a private-label ISP gives them another way to impress their brand, foster community, and generate revenue. But their service is only as good as what their partners can provide. "If we offer bad service, that hurts you in the eyes of your customers," admits Alden Levy, chief operating officer of iConnect.

A more reliable bet may be to go straight to the source. Cable & Wireless, the international telecommunications company, last month announced that it would offer a private-label Net service called Virtual ISP. Unlike its smaller dot-com competitors, which have to buy Internet access from a bandwidth provider, Cable & Wireless owns a network backbone.

"We're going to have a tremendous advantage over those smaller players, since we don't have to resell network access. We own the whole network," says Jim Abramson, Cable & Wireless's product manager.

But don't expect too many more major telcos to enter the market anytime soon, for fear of competing with the big ISPs that already offer service over their backbones.

Spinway, on the other hand, sees traditional ISPs as the next niche to target for cobranded service. Rather than compete with each other, free ISPs and pay ISPs could work together to offer a range of access services, says Spinway Chief Executive Officer Dan Robinson. "I think there'll be a divergence between high-end pay services and free services. We want to help ISPs keep the people who want to go to a free service."