AboveNet

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

~ the obituary ~

There is a class of company you only ever meet as a hop in a traceroute. AboveNet was one of those for most of its life. It never sold anything to a person at home in Ankara on a 33.6k modem, and by the time I had broadband on TTNet it was selling dark fiber to banks and to other carriers across seventeen american markets. The distance here is commercial rather than regional. This was infrastructure sold wholesale, and the point of buying it was that nobody downstream would ever hear your name.

The company was founded in 1993 by Sherman Tuan and went public on Nasdaq in December 1998. In March 1999 the stock rose 32 percent in a single day on the announcement of a split, which tells you most of what you need to know about the market it had gone public into. Metromedia bought it in June 1999 for a price the Wall Street Journal put at $1.76 billion and Reuters put at $1.55 billion. The deal carried PAIX, the peering exchange business, along with it.

The direction of the rename is the part that usually gets remembered backwards. Metromedia renamed the combined company Metromedia Fiber Network in 2000, so AboveNet was the name that went away, not the name that arrived. Verizon put $970 million into convertible bonds and another $715.4 million into common stock that same year. SiteSmith cost $1.36 billion in stock in 2001. A $611 million funding package led by Citicorp USA arrived in October 2001 and bought seven months. The chapter 11 petition was filed on 20 May 2002, against $3.3 billion of consolidated debt and roughly $37.3 million in cash, by a company that had never once made a profit. It came back out in September 2003 and took the original name with it.

~ the case file ~

~ webcondo ~

The earliest surviving capture of abovenet.com is 30 December 1996, and the page inside it was last edited on 5 September that year. The product on it is called WebCondo. AboveNet is selling internet co-location and guaranteed bandwidth, and underneath sits a meta description aimed squarely at 1996 search engines, running through four different spellings of co-location including one, "web coloation", that is simply a typo nobody ever went back for.

The address it wanted you to know was MAE-WEST and the Pac Bell NAP. That is the entire business in one line: put your server one hop from the exchange point and stop paying for transit you do not need. The company spent the next nineteen years being sold to progressively larger buyers on exactly that argument. Digital Realty took the east coast data centers for $40 million in 2006. In 2007 it picked up metro fiber that AT&T and Verizon were being forced to divest on antitrust grounds. By 2011 it was doing $472 million in revenue with 713 people, and Zayo closed on it the following July for $2.2 billion in cash, a figure the Denver Business Journal headlined as $2.3 billion.

~ abo venet ~

abovenet.com answers 406 today over plain http and over https alike, which is a server refusing rather than a domain that has gone quiet. The archive shows what it is refusing to show. The current site is a fashion and beauty blog written in Brazilian Portuguese under the name Abo Venet, and the posts are about where to buy skirt shorts and tailored trousers that will survive a few washes.

Somebody bought the domain, split the name across a space that had never been there, and kept it. Zayo still runs the fiber under its own brand. Nothing on that network is called AboveNet anymore, and the word now belongs to somebody writing about clothes who says in their own byline that they value their money.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »