Ascend Communications

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

~ the obit ~

In September 1996 a company in Alameda, California shipped a rack unit called the MAX TNT, which could terminate a DS3 worth of dial-up lines in a few inches of cabinet space. Every modem call made to an internet provider has to be answered by something at the far end, and for roughly four years that something was usually built by Ascend Communications.

It was founded in 1988 by Rob Ryan and Jeanette Symons along with two other engineers, and it spent its early years on ISDN and videoconferencing equipment before the dial-up boom arrived and made it enormous. Ryan ran the company until 1995 and Mory Ejabat took over after him. By 1997 there were about 1,800 employees. In the final quarter of 1996 alone Ascend signed more than 300 new internet providers as customers, and across the industry over two million dial-up ports of MAX TNT capacity were eventually sold.

Money on that scale buys other companies. Ascend took the backbone router maker NetStar in 1996, then Cascade Communications in 1997 for its frame relay and ATM switches. In August 1998 it paid 822 million dollars in stock for Stratus Computer, a fault-tolerant server business with no obvious connection to answering phone calls.

Lucent Technologies announced the purchase on 13 January 1999, converting each Ascend share into 0.825 Lucent shares, worth about twenty billion dollars against the previous day's close. The deal closed on 24 June. Lucent sold the Stratus business on to private investors and kept the access gear, which was the part it had wanted and also the part whose market was about to disappear underneath it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the far side of the handshake ~

Dialing TTNet from a house in Turkey in 1999 meant listening to a 33.6k modem negotiate with something I never once thought about. There was a room somewhere with racks in it, and a port on one of those racks was mine for as long as the call lasted. I do not know whose equipment Türk Telekom bought and I have never seen a photograph of the inside of one of those buildings.

What I know now is that the global odds favored this company, because by 1997 most of the world's dial-up ports came from it. The single piece of hardware I depended on most in my first years online was one I could not have named and would not have recognized in a photograph. That is a normal relationship to have with infrastructure. It is a strange one to have with the thing that made the noise.

~ twenty billion dollars ~

The price is what gets remembered, and it deserves to be. It was the largest technology merger anyone had completed at the time, and it was paid in Lucent stock at a moment when Lucent stock was near the top of its run. Nobody collected twenty billion dollars. They collected 0.825 of a share each, in a company that lost more than 99 percent of its value over the following three years and was eventually sold to Alcatel.

Lucent's reasoning was defensible on the day. Data was going to be bigger than voice, and Ascend owned the equipment that carried consumer data. Cisco was buying everything in sight and Lucent needed an answer to it. The flaw was in the word "dial-up", which described a business that existed because the last mile was a telephone line. Once the last mile stopped being a telephone line, the most valuable product in the industry became a warehouse problem.

~ two million ports ~

A dial-up port is an odd unit to count. It is one simultaneous phone call, held open for as long as somebody stays logged on, and an internet provider had to own enough of them to cover the evening. The whole arithmetic of that era ran on the ratio between subscribers sold and subscribers online at eight at night, and providers who got it wrong gave you a busy signal.

Ascend sold the hardware that made the ratio work, at the exact moment the number of people wanting to be online at eight at night was doubling every year. Then everyone moved to a connection that was simply always on, and the unit itself stopped existing. There is no such thing as a port count on broadband. The business did not shrink so much as the thing it measured went away.

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