Com21

» see com21.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Com21 was incorporated in Delaware on 19 June 1992, in Milpitas, California. A later amendment to its own prospectus gives the 29th instead and nobody ever reconciled the two. It did not ship a product until April 1997, which is five years of building a company before a customer could buy anything, and the accumulated deficit on 31 December 1997 stood at $35.3 million.

What it built was a complete system for carrying data over cable television plant. Rack equipment sat in the headend and modems sat in the subscriber's living room, with management software running both from a Sun workstation. The modems did not get IP addresses at all, they were addressed by MAC and switched inside an ATM fabric, which was a defensible engineering choice when the system was designed and an increasingly awkward one every year after. Cable operators bought it. By 2000 the installed networks passed 15 million households and the company had shipped more than half a million modems.

The chairman of the board, from the company's inception in June 1992 until the end, was Paul Baran. His board biography in the 1998 prospectus is mostly a list of awards for the work on distributed packet switching he had done at RAND thirty years earlier. He held Series A shares through a family trust dated 1984, alongside 3Com and Kleiner Perkins on the later rounds.

~ the dossier ~

~ the standard arrives ~

The proprietary system was the whole proposition: a cable operator in 1997 who wanted internet service had to buy somebody's entire stack, so it might as well be the one that worked. DOCSIS turned that argument inside out. Once there was a specification, head-end gear and modems came from different vendors at falling prices, and a cable operator had no reason to be locked to one supplier ever again.

Com21 did build DOCSIS products, certifying DOXport modems on Broadcom silicon and selling a DOXcontroller termination system that ARRIS resold as the Cadant C3. It was competent work and it was late, arriving into a market where the margin had already been standardized away.

~ the arithmetic ~

The revenue line in the last annual report reads $48.1 million in 1998, $95.7 million in 1999, $194.0 million in 2000, $122.8 million in 2001 and $56.2 million in 2002. Underneath it, the company recorded a net loss in every one of those years, including the good ones. Research spending followed the same curve down, from $46.9 million in 2000 to $11.2 million in 2002, by which point the engineering organization was 53 people split between Milpitas and Cork.

Nasdaq delisted the shares on 21 February 2003 and they moved to the bulletin board. The Chapter 11 petition followed on 15 July, case number 03-54533, in the US Bankruptcy Court for northern California, San Jose division. On 1 August the company announced a hearing to approve the sale of its DOCSIS line and its Irish subsidiary to ARRIS for $2,796,000, and said plainly in the same release that creditor claims were about $25,000,000 and that it believed its own stock to be without value.

~ three links and a sentence ~

The website kept serving the same small homepage for two months after the filing. Then, in September 2003, it was replaced by a 603 byte page in plain Arial. It says that Com21 has recently sold a number of its product lines to other companies, then lists where they went. The ATM system to HS Data Solutions, the DOXport modems to CastleNet in Taiwan. The DOXcontroller went to ARRIS, which kept it alive long enough to get it certified for DOCSIS 2.0. Under the list sits one more sentence. All other products are discontinued and support and service are no longer available from Com21. By then the company's own count of what it had shipped in eleven years stood at over two million modems.

The first fast line in my house came over a phone wire, not a television cable, so this hardware was never going to turn up in my building. Somebody else's basement in California had it, and so did a street cabinet in a city with cable plant worth upgrading.

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