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Internet firm
to start up here
'PIXC' hopes to provide
By Peter Wagner
50 jobs and put Hawaii on
the high-tech map
Star-BulletinA local boy who found success in California's Silicon Valley is back with a $100 million plan to speed up the world.
Lambert Onuma, former director of business development and research at Digital Equipment Corp., unveiled a Honolulu-based high-tech venture today called Pacific Internet Exchange Corp.
The company, in planning for more than a year, hopes to put Hawaii on the map by becoming a premier provider of Internet switching services worldwide.
"The Internet is experiencing traffic jams all around the world, especially outside of North America," said Onuma. "Our job is to build exchange facilities as quickly as possible to reduce network congestion and speed up Internet communications."
"PIXC" is to start operating next month with about 20 employees in a bunkerlike 10,000-square-foot facility near Honolulu Airport. The $12 million exchange center is to be the first in a network of 12, with other locations in Asia.
Onuma expects to have 50 employees in Hawaii and 150 throughout the network -- in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea -- by year's end, an anticipated $100 million investment.
The company also plans to open a Los Angeles office in June.
"Internet providers, telecom companies, entire nations will become more productive practically overnight," Onuma said.
Notable among directors of the new firm is former Gov. George Ariyoshi, who attended today's news conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Also present were Gov. Benjamin Cayetano, UH President Kenneth Mortimer and numerous executives from telecom companies in Hawaii and Asia.
Ariyoshi has been "very useful to us in making connections in Asia," Onuma said.
Internet exchanges -- switching centers for Internet service providers -- are customarily owned or operated by large telecommunications companies or Internet service providers. Internet traffic is often slowed because there aren't enough high-speed switching centers, Onuma said. He noted that only a handful exist in North America.
But PIXC will offer a "neutral" service speeding up connections and providing networks where participants can tap into each other's database through "peering" agreements, he said.
One pioneer in the field is PAIX, a Palo Alto, Calif., company that is the brainchild of Digital Equipment. PAIX, a subsidiary of Metromedia Fiber Network Inc., began operating an exchange in 1996, and currently has about 100 customers, including Digital Island, a fast-growing Internet company which got its start in Hawaii and is now based in San Francisco.
Onuma, chief executive officer of PIXC, is co-founder and former chief executive of Silicon Valley high-tech firm Interlink Computer Sciences Inc.
Born and raised on Oahu and a graduate of Hawaii Mission Academy, Onuma found about 75 percent of his Honolulu staff in Hawaii but said he had to look elsewhere, including Asia and California, to find the specific talent needed. Still, he chose to locate in Honolulu for strategic reasons.
"We could have set up this business in Silicon Valley, but because our first market is Asia, the travel burden on our employees would have been too extensive," he said. "Plus, we wanted the quality of life we could only find here in Hawaii."
