HanseNet

» see hansenet.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

HanseNet was founded in Hamburg in 1995 by Hamburgische Electricitäts-Werke, the city's electricity utility. That is less odd than it sounds. A power company owns cable routes and the legal right to dig up a street, which in the mid-nineties was most of what you needed to become a telecoms operator in a market that had just been opened.

Germany produced companies like that because Deutsche Telekom's local loop was unbundled and somebody else could put their own equipment in the exchange. Turkey never did. Through the same years the copper here stayed with the incumbent, and choosing a provider was mostly choosing who resold you the same line. There was no route in for a municipal utility, so there is no Turkish HanseNet to set beside this one, and the German version reads from here like something that was structurally impossible at home.

e.Biscom, an Italian broadband operator, bought 80 percent of HanseNet in 2000. Telecom Italia took full ownership by 2003 and ran it as its German arm. Under that owner the consumer brand became Alice, which was already Telecom Italia's broadband brand in Italy, and the German advertising was built for years around the Italian model Vanessa Hessler. A Hamburg utility spinoff was now selling DSL to Bavarians under a name chosen in Rome.

It worked. By the first half of 2009 HanseNet had 2.289 million DSL customers, 1.87 million of them on the full Alice package, on revenue of 568.7 million euros for those six months. The network reached about 150 German cities and the company employed 1,857 people in 2010, with offices in Rostock and Saarbrücken alongside Hamburg.

~ the case file ~

~ the italian years ~

Alice sold a flat rate into a market that had been metered for a long time, and it sold on price and on not being Telekom. Alice TV put IPTV down the same line from the mid-2000s. Alice Disk arrived in March 2010 as cloud storage bundled with an internet connection, an early instinct about where the value was heading that did not outlive the company by much.

The speeds date the era precisely. Alice offered DSL up to 16 Mbit/s and VDSL up to 50 in the cities where it had fiber to the cabinet. In 2010 that was genuinely fast, and owning the network mattered: where HanseNet had built, it could undercut resellers who were paying Telekom for every line.

Telefónica bought HanseNet from Telecom Italia in 2010. The Spanish group already owned O2 in Germany, a mobile business with no fixed-line footprint, and HanseNet was the missing half of it. That same logic is what killed the name.

~ the nine months after ~

HanseNet stopped existing on 1 April 2011, merged into Telefónica Germany. The brand outlived the company that carried it. Alice kept selling and kept advertising until 16 January 2012, when Telefónica retired it. The products were folded under O2 DSL on 13 December 2012. Customers went through two rebrands in under two years without their line changing once.

Both old addresses still work, and both of them land you on o2online.de. A German utility's internet company and the Italian brand it wore collapse into a single redirect, which is the normal fate of an ISP name. The network it built under Hamburg went to Telefónica with everything else.

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