corega

» see corega.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In Turkey the router was not a thing you chose. It came in the box with the subscription, the installer set it up, and that was the end of the decision. A whole consumer category that existed properly in Japan and the United States barely existed here as a shelf, because the carrier had already filled it before you got to the shop. corega spent twenty eight years selling into the space that Turkish ISPs simply occupied.

Allied Telesis set it up in August 1996 as a wholly owned subsidiary with ten million yen of capital. The parent was an enterprise networking company selling switches to businesses, and the split was the ordinary one: keep the serious brand for the people who read spec sheets, invent a friendlier name for the people buying a hub at a consumer electronics store. corega got the hubs, the home routers, the KVM switches and the USB adapters.

The timing was almost perfect. Japan went from dial-up to some of the fastest consumer broadband on earth across exactly the window corega was operating in, and every household that upgraded needed a box to put between the line and the machines. For a decade the answer on a Japanese shelf was a small white corega unit at a price nobody had to think about.

~ the case file ~

~ how it actually ended ~

The end took sixteen years and four corporate steps, which is a lot of paperwork for a brand that was already finished. On 1 July 2009 Allied Telesis absorbed the subsidiary and turned it into an internal business division. On 6 January 2014 the division was spun back out as a company again, capitalized at fifty million yen. On 25 February 2021 the independent website was switched off and everything moved onto the parent's domain. On 1 July 2024 the company merged into Allied Telesis and was dissolved.

None of that was the actual cause. The cause is that the carrier started shipping the router. Once fiber and cable providers bundled the gateway with the line, the consumer network box stopped being a purchase and became an accessory that arrived on its own, and the shelf that corega lived on shrank to almost nothing. The parent company was posting operating losses by the middle of the 2010s and had auditors writing about material uncertainty over its ability to continue.

~ what came after ~

Allied Telesis still hosts the corega support pages, which is the most honest kind of memorial a hardware brand gets. There is an FAQ tree covering routers and wireless routers and network cameras and KVM switches, all written for people whose hardware is a decade old and still plugged in. The product index next to it is titled discontinued products, and there is no other product index.

That is the shape of a consumer hardware death. Nothing gets switched off, because a hub does not have a server to disconnect. The company that made it stops existing, the website redirects, the support page stays up for the installed base, and the boxes keep passing traffic in houses until somebody moves and throws them out. corega has no shutdown notice anywhere because there was nothing to shut down.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »