chello

» see chello.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

1999 is a year I remember clearly and chello is not in it. I was on a 56k modem in Turkey, listening to the handshake, watching the connection time tick up because the connection time was the bill. In the Netherlands and Austria that same spring, people were getting a cable modem that was on when they woke up and still on when they went to bed, for a flat price every month.

The distance on this one is infrastructure rather than timing. chello was a cable television product, sold down the coaxial cable a cable operator had already run to your building. Turkey had cable television, but broadband here came later and came over Türk Telekom's ADSL, so no Turkish equivalent of chello arrived on that timetable. There was no cable operator here with a pan-European rollout budget behind it.

chello was the internet brand of United Pan-Europe Communications, the Amsterdam cable group that Liberty Global eventually absorbed. The name went into the market in 1998 and the service launched in March 1999, in five countries on the same day. By the end of that year UPC was announcing its fifty thousandth subscriber, which sounds small until you remember what fifty thousand permanently connected households meant anywhere in Europe in 1999.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The product ladder is the period in miniature: chello starter at the bottom and chello extreme at the top, with three more tiers between them. It took the Best Consumer ISP award in 1999. By the middle of the next decade the name was on cable internet in eight European countries, plus a New Zealand appearance through TelstraSaturn. About half a million of the subscribers were Dutch and the total across all markets ran to roughly 1.3 million.

What chello sold was not speed, which was modest by any later standard. It sold the absence of a ritual. No dialing and no meter running. Anyone whose first connection was metered understands immediately why that was the entire product.

~ the merger that did not happen ~

In 2000 chello was going to be a company in its own right. UPC had set up chello broadband N.V. as a subsidiary and was preparing to float it, with the listing penciled in for the first quarter of the year.

Instead, on 18 July 2000, UPC and its parent UnitedGlobalCom announced that chello broadband would merge with the international operations of Excite@Home. The result was to be called Excite Chello, would have run across fifteen countries and carried a valuation around 5.5 billion euros. It would have been the largest broadband group anywhere outside the United States.

It collapsed in December 2000 over funding and over who would run the thing. Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy nine months after that. chello went back to being a brand name on a cable bill, which in hindsight is the outcome that let it survive another nine years.

~ the postmortem ~

There is no shutdown date because nothing was shut down. The subscribers kept their connections and the connections kept working. What happened is that Liberty Global decided everything should be called UPC, and the chello name came off one market at a time.

Belgium went first, absorbed into Telenet in 2006. The Netherlands dropped the name in July 2007. Poland stopped using it on 15 January 2008, renaming chello easy and chello ultra into Internet Sprint and Internet Ultra. Austria held out longest, and in November 2009 UPC there renamed the chello products Fiber Power. Der Standard's headline was that UPC was sending chello into retirement.

Ten years is a long run for an internet brand and chello used them well. By the end, the thing it had been selling was no longer remarkable enough to need a name of its own. Being always on had simply become what the word internet meant.

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