If your organization has a permanent connection to the Internet, then Light Reading would like to offer you an opportunity to do yourself a good turn while taking part in a pioneering telecom project.

Under this scheme, you'll get a free six-month trial of a service that usually costs US$1,500 a year – with no strings attached. It will enable you to monitor what your organization is doing with its Internet connection, in terms of how much traffic is being handled and whether your service provider is giving you value for money.

This data will be presented on a secure Website, using easy-to-understand color graphics. It will be updated every three minutes, enabling you to investigate problems as they arise, rather than after the event:

It will also provide a historical perspective, enabling you to spot trends and see at a glance whether you're overloading (or under-utilizing) your access line:

Pioneering Project

In doing this, you will be collaborating with hundreds of your peers to help Light Reading nail down the facts on the growth of business traffic on the Internet. It will also enable us to demonstrate key differences in the quality of service offered by different operators around the world.

We'll do this by aggregating the statistics that we collect from all of the enterprise users participating in this trial. We'll collect this data automatically from your access router. Setting this up is very simple – it'll only take a couple of minutes of your time – and after that, no further work is necessary. Within 24 hours, you'll be able to log on to our server and see what's happening on your access line.

Light Reading is partnering with a U.K. company called Net Evidence to conduct this exercise, which is likely to be continued indefinitely if it proves successful.

Net Evidence is already providing the service that will be offered free of charge by Light Reading. It's called "Highlight" and is also offered by WorldCom Inc. (Nasdaq: WCOM), PSINet Inc., and Energis PLC to their customers in Europe. While these service providers use Highlight for customer retention and traffic planning, we'll be using it to watchthe Internet on a larger scale.

The process of collecting statistics is secure and puts negligible load (around a thousandth of a percent) on the circuit. The service is fully administrated by Net Evidence, so the ongoing workload for you and your organization is precisely nil. You’ll have your own username and password to a secure Web server where you can view the results for your own circuit. And you will be able to use a fictitious company name for display on the reports so that no one knows who you are except us.

For a demonstration of Highlight, or to download PDFs giving more information, click here. Register Your Interest

We’re currently recruiting participants for the Traffic Tracker project. If you are responsible for your organization's Internet service, and we’ve piqued your interest, let us have your email address, and we’ll keep you posted on developments.

There’s absolutely no obligation at this stage: You’re simply registering an interest, and we’ll update you as the project develops. We’d appreciate a little background information on you and your company, though. Just click on the link below and fill in the form, and you’ll hear from us shortly confirming your registration. We’ll also send you more details on the project.

Receive more information about the Traffic Tracker program.

— Peter Heywood, Founding Editor, Light Reading
http://www.lightreading.com