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10 Questions

with Milan Švácha
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By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
November 7th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
Milan Švácha of Casablanca expects all telecom services to migrate to the Internet in the future.
THE ŠVÁCHA FILE

Job title: Founder and CEO, Casablanca INT; director, NIX.CZ
Age: 40
Nationality: Czech
Education: EMBA, University of Pittsburgh
Family: Two children

For the past 11 years, the business-to-business Internet company Casablanca INT has quietly grown to control 25 percent of the country’s co-location services market, hosting the Web sites of large and small companies; it also provides corporate high-speed Internet. On the heels of rolling out phone services, the company’s founder, Milan Švácha, talks to The Prague Post about the need for network neutrality, why hackers go through Asia and possible EU regulation of illegal content.
➊ You founded Casablanca in 1996, when the Internet was just dawning on popular consciousness. How have you seen the local market develop since then?
It’s a busy market. There are a lot of companies — not just big companies like Telefónica O2 and GTS, but also small companies trying to launch Internet businesses. Czechs, as a people, are very inventive. And we have a lot of people trying out Internet content. That’s why we have 5,000–6,000 servers. Some of them are very small companies.
On the Internet service provider [ISP] end, it’s a cutthroat business. When we were entering the European Union, I was asked what it meant for competition. I said nothing, because ISPs have fought each other for so many years. It’s a market that’s gone through tough consolidation. Operators that have stayed have found their space on the market. And now there’s room for growth.
➋ Does the country still have a ways to go in its use of high-speed Internet connections?
There’s definitely more space for acceptance. People are getting used to nice, smooth connections, say from cable television, and when they go to parts of the country where they can’t get a good connection, they complain. They say, “We have this at home.” Of course, they forget that they’re sitting in Prague. When you’re in the middle of nowhere in a little village, only low-quality connections are likely to be available.
➌ How much faster will high-speed connections get in the future?
An important part of this business is local Internet exchanges. I’m on the board of NIX.CZ, one of the largest Internet exchanges in Europe. The biggest are in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London. These allow service providers to share traffic between our networks, and meetings of these exchanges help determine the Internet’s future.
The current speed limits we see don’t come from fiber optics. It’s just glass and can be upgraded. It’s the hardware we put at the end: switches, high-capacity routers. Right now the max bandwidth NIX.CZ uses is 10 gigabytes per second (Gbps). Next, we’ll jump straight to 100 Gbps. At some of the largest exchanges, 100 Gbps may not be enough by the time it arrives.  
➍ What’s your stance on network neutrality, the burgeoning movement to guarantee that ISPs allow traffic to flow freely?
One of the mobile operators here, I won’t say which, filters Skype. That means the network of this operator is not neutral, because he puts filters on the network. To be truly neutral, you cannot filter any services. Casablanca gives the client a full connection without any filters. You can download and upload whatever you like.
➎ How much do you cooperate with legal authorities to prosecute illegal activities that happened over your network?
It happens. The Internet is a free medium. You have a lot of hacker activity, and when a hacker attacks, most of them leave a trail of IP addresses, unique identification numbers assigned to each computer. If someone attacked by a hacker finds a trace of this IP address, they can go to the police, and the police come to us. We give them all the information we’re entitled to give under Czech law.
➏ Speaking of IP addresses, there has been some concern that we could eventually run out of these in the future. How large a fear is this?
We still have enough IP addresses in Europe, definitely, and there are enough in the United States. There is a mess in Asia, unfortunately. A lot of hacker attacks go through Asia, because it’s difficult to trace their IP addresses.
The future is called IPv6. It’s better, more secure and the number of addresses is much higher. But the problem is you have something that works — the current system — and you have something better, IPv6. Economically, it’s better to use the former than the latter. In Europe, we’ve talked about forcing ISPs to use IPv6 more. But that means we’d have to force our customers to use IPv6 and carry that flag.
➐ How closely do EU authorities attempt to regulate the Internet?
Not so much now, but I expect there will be pressure from the EU on ISPs to take care of unlawful content in the future. Some content has really gone bad. When you’re talking about terrorist activities and child pornography, it’s gotten out of hand. I do think the EU will attempt to take care of this better than it does now.
➑ Would you welcome such an effort?
As a person, I’d definitely welcome it. As a businessman, it would cost some money. We’d have to have a tool to monitor it and people to take care of it. But it can be done.
➒ You’ve begun offering phone service over the Internet. What other services do you expect to migrate to the Internet?
Internet protocol (IP) is the future. I think everything will go over IP. When my sales staff says that everything will go over IP, of course my technicians say, “We hope IP can take it.” I even believe that mobile phone technologies and video will run over IP. It’s only a question of time.
➓ Why the name Casablanca?
I set up the company with two friends. When we were teenagers, we liked the American band KISS. And they got famous through the small record label called Casablanca. And we said, “If KISS got successful with that name, we will as well.”
Want your manager to answer our 10 Questions? Send a message to Paul Voosen at pvoosen@praguepost.com


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