Caspian Group provides IT management services and applications development to clients in the healthcare industry. One of its biggest customers is Delta Dental Plan of California, for which Caspian Group manages LAN and WAN networks, desktop computers and servers, storage networks and development of new business software applications for non-mainframe platforms.

Caspian Group uses the Internet to support client sites, handle remote terminal sessions, communicate with traveling executives and consultants through VPNs and test software applications.

"When we outgrew our T-1 line with a national ISP, we looked for a new service provider to provide higher bandwidth, lower prices and above all, better customer service," said Brad Morrison, CTO and co-founder of Caspian Group. "After looking closely at all the major carriers serving the Bay Area, we chose Yipes."

"Yipes' end-to-end Ethernet service is so much easier to manager and to scale incrementally," Morrison continued. "If I need more bandwidth for a specific event, I can get it in seconds, not months. We can even get guaranteed bandwidth with quality of service as we move to implement voice-over-IP applications."

As the IT services firm expands its software development business, times will arise when it needs to upload hundreds of megabytes of code over the Internet into customer servers in a single evening. "That's the sort of application we can handle with Yipes, but couldn't with standard fixed-bandwidth services," he said.

Morrison determined that the total cost of ownership for Yipes' fully managed service is much than for legacy T-1 services. Yipes provides Caspian Group with 5 Megabits per second of bandwidth for about the same price other carriers charge for 3 Mbps (two T-1 lines), he said. To connect to Yipes, he plugged an Ethernet card into his Cisco router at a cost of a few hundred dollars. To support several T-1 lines would have required purchasing and installing CSU/DSUs, an inverse multiplexer and a new router at a cost of as much as $50,000.