January 22, 2002 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Yipes Communications, Inc. (yipes.com), a provider of Ethernet services, announced yesterday that its gigabit optical networks now
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power the fifth largest multiple listing service in the United States, North
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Texas Real Estate Information Systems, Inc. (ntreis-mls.com).
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Owned by 18 non-profit Realtor associations in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth
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area, NTREIS lists properties over an area of 20,000 square miles for 15,000
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subscribers, including 3,000 real estate offices. NTREIS is migrating from a
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dial-up data network to the Internet for gathering information and
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distributing listings. Posting an average of 10,000 new photos to the
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Internet each month, NTREIS outgrew the two fixed T-1 lines it leased from
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the phone company. Last year, when it installed servers in a new co-location
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facility in Dallas, the real estate organization switched to Yipes’ optical
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networks for high-speed Internet service.
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“I liked Yipes’ innovative technology, its dual-homed Internet backbones and
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its very competitive price,” said James Harrison, CEO of NTREIS. “Our
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response time has greatly improved since getting Yipes.”
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A key factor in Harrison’s choice of Yipes was the network’s unique ability
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to change bandwidth from 1 Megabit per second all the way up to 1000 Mbps,
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in 1 Mbps increments. Unlike traditional networks, Yipes lets customers
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adjust their service level through a Web portal, without waiting for new
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circuits and without having to buy and install new equipment at the customer
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premise.
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“Yipes’ scalability was really important to us,” Harrison said. “Our demand
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varies greatly with seasonal trends, and I wanted to be able to raise or
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lower our bandwidth accordingly. We have already doubled our bandwidth from
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Yipes to 6 Mbps as we have migrated more users to the Internet and our needs
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could nearly double again by the end of the year. We will require even more
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bandwidth when we begin to host virtual home tours, giving buyers the
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ability to view rooms from all angles via the Web.”
