Our two leading companies--AT&T Cerfnet and Radka--were solid in all our categories of evaluation, but AT&T Cerfnet offers much more in terms of overall staffing and help-desk support than Radka, which has 23 full-time employees and a staff of nine devoted to its help desk. AT&T Cerfnet doesn't release staffing figures, but confirms that its help desk staff easily exceeds 30.

Even so, Radka can arm-wrestle this telco giant when it comes to supported services. Radka provides services in every single category we consider important to mid-tier businesses, including integration with ERP applications. So does AT&T--with one glaring omission: It doesn't offer services aimed at promoting a commerce site. Neither does USi. Given the unique marketing challenges of pulling customers to a newly launched commerce site, failure to promote that e-business can doom even the most beautifully designed and best-run site to oblivion.

The mid-tier five excelled in performance and reliability, with four commanding a ratio of peak load to aggregate bandwidth of 1:1.5 or better (the fifth, Radka, is at 1:1). These four CSPs agree that it is critical in commerce to have a minimum margin of 1:1, given the suddenly shifting peaks that can accompany something as innocent as a URL mentioned on national television. AT&T, Radka and USi also go the extra mile to provide cross-server dynamic load balancing.

While Catalog.Com and WAASI were strong in many areas, they fell behind the others in regard to payment systems. Catalog.Com doesn't offer online tax calculation, membership tracking or subscription support. WAASI doesn't offer membership tracking, subscription support or bill presentment. We didn't evaluate peering arrangements, but WAASI also runs a bit thin in this area compared to our other leading providers. And AT&T is the only one of our top five offering multicurrency support. Catalog.Com's overall score also suffered because of its failure to offer 24-hour support--something many mid-tier vendors consider de rigueur. Catalog. Com does, however, provide off-hours support via e-mail.

Shining Lights in the Small Business Arena
When it comes to CSPs serving small businesses, we chose to profile companies with the largest help-desk support staffs, because this category of service provider contains more than its share of garage operations, one-man shop resellers and outrageous claims.

In this yet-to-be-consolidated market arena, companies like AnaServe, Interland and Sage Networks truly provide a beacon of light. Rounding out our top five CSPs in this category are Forman and Netcom.

Interland missed earning the maximum number of points in our service profile in just one category: It reported a 1:1 ratio of peak-to-aggregate bandwidth. Of 30 small business CSPs providing the information necessary to calculate this ratio, Interland was one of three reporting a 1:1 ratio. The vast majority (21) reported bandwidth in excess of their peak load figure. But Interland, with more than 13,000 sites, a quarter of which are e-commerce, also wins kudos in areas we didn't grade--including its private peering arrangements with major backbone providers.

Sage Networks fell short of a perfect score in two areas: It reported less than a 1:1 ratio in peak to aggregate bandwidth (1:0.87) and it doesn't support our list of credit-card fraud services, although it does offer services to confirm that a credit-card number is authentic.

On the other hand, Sage's range of services rivals that of some of the very largest CSPs--such as support for SET, EDI, integrated voice response, the Open Buying Over the Internet (OBI) standard, traffic routing by bill type, service-level agreements, e-mail virus scanning and cross-server dynamic load balancing. Interland, too, said it supports all of these except SET and AnaServe supports six of these eight service features. In our infrastructure survey, Sage also proved to be one of the more venturesome companies when it came to using something other than HTML on client machines and in using Java on the server.

In third place in our lineup, AnaServe, a Concentric Network company, also presents a very solid set of commerce services, although it reports fewer products per site than other CSPs in this group, as well as fewer dedicated servers. It also lacks fax server support and support for varied levels of site administration by the merchant. The loss of points in these areas, however, may simply reflect a different customer base than, say, Interland's. For example, Interland has 2,500 resellers compared to AnaServe's 450--and resellers frequently purchase dedicated, rather than shared, servers.

Why so many resellers in this category? Global economics: Bandwidth is more plentiful and cheaper in the United States than in many nations. Interland estimates that 70 percent of its sites are reseller-based and about a third of these resellers are from other nations.

For its part, Forman said it supports only four of our nine suggested payment systems; notably missing are tax calculation and multicurrency support. Netcom supports only three, although it does provide tax calculation services. In overall services, Forman was missing only two of 14-- multiple privilege levels for administration and physical goods fulfillment, services that may not be a top priority for small businesses.

Netcom, however, hit only six of our 14 services, with fraud control and site design among the missing. Although Netcom made our top five by meeting our help-desk criteria, it nevertheless shows up as extremely weak in our performance and reliability category, since it lacks server redundancy, service-level agreements and customer tools to gauge performance. The company also failed to provide information about aggregate bandwidth and peak load.

Although Forman's score hovers near Netcom's, it presents a much better balanced plate of services to small businesses, as well as simplified billing and its own commerce software, Internet Creator. That may be one reason why Visa is offering its 800,000 small merchants special discounts for CSP services and products at both Forman and Earthlink beginning in February. Forman also hoped by December 1998 to offer a 15-minute to 24-hour merchant bank-approval process.