2Wire

» see 2wire.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

You could not buy a 2Wire. That is the first thing to know about a company that shipped more than thirty-one million units. Every one of them went out through a telephone company, which is why the name is simultaneously everywhere in the 2000s and impossible to remember. In the United States the gateway arrived in an AT&T box with an installer attached, and after that it was the thing blinking in a cupboard for eight years.

Brian Hinman founded it in San Jose in July 1998, after co-founding PictureTel and then Polycom, and the HomePortal appeared at CES in January 2000. The pitch was that one box should do everything a household then bought separately, from the modem out to the wireless, and that the carrier should be able to see inside it from a thousand miles away. Investors put somewhere between $169 million and $199 million into the company across six years, and no single document gives the real total.

In December 2005 Alcatel bought a quarter of the company, and AT&T and Telmex took minority stakes from the existing shareholders at the same time. Telmex's own annual report filed with the SEC puts its holding at 13.0 percent. For a company whose products were distributed, in Alcatel's word, "exclusively" by the major DSL providers, having the providers on the share register was either very good sense or the whole problem, depending on which year you asked.

~ the record ~

~ the white tower ~

The hardware was a tapered white tower that did not look like networking equipment, which was deliberate, because it was going to sit in a living room. Inside it was a DSL modem wrapped in a small router with 802.11 wireless on top. The model numbers read like license plates, 2701HG and 5268AC. The later i3802V and i3812V were weatherproof and bolted to the outside of the house, which is where the phone line already arrived.

What you touched was a web page at 192.168.1.254, or at gateway.2wire.net if you typed the friendly name, and the password was the System Access Code printed on a sticker on the unit, which you had never chosen and which made whoever was physically standing next to the box the administrator. The manual told you to use Internet Explorer 5.5 or Netscape 6. The first screen was called Network at a Glance, and what it showed was the state of the line coming in against the state of the house behind it.

~ the protocol nobody credits ~

In 2002 the company built a management system to reach the gateways it had already shipped, and published the specification as the Open Gateway Management Protocol. The DSL Forum took that work and ratified TR-069 in 2004. TR-069 is the reason your internet provider can push firmware to the router in your house without asking, and reboot it from a support desk. It is one of the most widely deployed protocols almost no end user has heard of, and the company that wrote the draft it came from is a trademark that lapsed.

~ how the name lapsed ~

The 2009 accounts, disclosed because Pace had to put the deal to its shareholders, show revenue of $667.4 million against a gross profit of $141.8 million. A gross margin of 21 percent is what a hardware business looks like when a handful of customers set the price. Pace plc of Saltaire, West Yorkshire announced the purchase on 26 July 2010 for $475 million in cash, about $420 million net of the cash on 2Wire's own balance sheet. 2Wire had roughly 1,600 employees and Pace had just over 1,000, so the smaller company bought the bigger one and borrowed around $450 million to do it. The shareholders voted it through with 218 million shares in favor and five million against.

2wire.com went on serving the company's own site until at least 5 October 2010. By 24 October it had been replaced by a page reading "2Wire is now a part of Pace," with a handful of links to support and a speed test, and that page then sat there for six years with nothing changing but the year in the copyright line. It made it to 2016. Meanwhile an IPO that was reported as imminent in 2005 and again in 2007 never produced a filing of any kind: the company's complete record with the SEC is five paper notices of private share sales and nothing else.

The name went in pieces. The service mark lapsed on 9 December 2022, HOMEPORTAL on 31 March 2023, and the broad 2WIRE registration on 21 April 2023, each one because nobody filed a declaration that it was still in use. One registration was kept alive in July 2023 with most of its goods struck out, covering hardware and nothing else. The last legal entity anywhere with the name on it was a development office in India, which outlived the Delaware parent by about three years. AT&T's support site still lists nine device identifiers beginning with 2wire, and two of them point at photographs of gateways that Pace built after the company stopped existing.

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