Ebone

~ the goodbye ~

In the summer of 2002 my internet was an internet cafe in Turkey and a dial-up line at home, and it is entirely possible that some of what I loaded crossed Ebone without leaving a single trace I could have noticed. A quarter of Europe's traffic was on it. That is the nature of a backbone. You never find out which one carried you, and most people only learn the name on the day it stops.

Ebone was agreed at a RIPE meeting in Geneva in September 1991 and went online the following year, a pan-European backbone put together by the people who ran the national research networks. Frode Greisen out of Denmark was the general manager and Peter Löthberg was the architect in practice. The first links ran at 256 kbit/s. It was built to carry academic traffic and commercial traffic on the same wires, which in 1992 was still an unusual thing to say out loud.

Over nine years it got about forty thousand times faster, reaching 10 Gbit/s by 2001, and by 2000 it was selling international transit to something like a hundred European ISPs. Somewhere in there it stopped being a cooperative. It incorporated in Denmark in 1996. Three quarters of it went to Hermes Europe Railtel in 1998 and the rest to Global TeleSystems a year after that.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the company that bought it ~

KPNQwest was a 1999 joint venture, half Dutch national telecom and half Qwest of Denver, laying a 13,000 kilometer fiber ring across Europe. By 2000 it was reckoned to be carrying more than half of European IP traffic. In 2001 it bought Ebone from GTS for a figure reported at around 645 million euros, and then the accounting caught up with the whole industry. Operators had been swapping capacity with each other and booking both sides as revenue, and when that stopped working there was nothing underneath it. The court in Haarlem declared KPNQwest bankrupt on 31 May 2002.

~ eight days in brussels ~

What happened next is the reason this stone exists. The network operations center in Brussels stayed up because roughly a hundred people kept coming in to work at a company that had stopped paying them. They did it for eight days. On 14 June they set a deadline of quarter to five in the afternoon and said they would walk, and the liquidators found enough money to keep 70 of them on until the end of the month.

Any engineer can picture that room without being told. The part worth sitting with is that nobody with a claim on the asset was in it. The traffic of a continent stayed up through June 2002 because staff with no employer and no salary decided that it should.

~ what it sold for ~

The money ran out anyway. A last bid of about 15 million euros from Peter Wilkinson, one of the founders of Freeserve, was turned down by the Belgian administrator as too low and too conditional, and on 2 July the network was deactivated, with the trade press reporting the switch-off the next day. Ten thousand kilometers of it went dark at once.

Interoute bought the assets a fortnight later for roughly the same 15 million that had just been refused, something near two percent of what KPNQwest had paid months earlier. The fiber was fine. It went back into service under another name and most of Europe noticed neither the death nor the return, which is the correct outcome for infrastructure and a miserable one for the people who built it.

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