Hellas Online

» see hol.gr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

531,563 unbundled lines in August 2014. That is the number the company was carrying when Vodafone agreed to buy it, and it is the last honest measure of Hellas Online, because everything after that is a brand being folded up. HOL started in 1993 as dial-up for the Athens metropolitan area, which at the time was a business with almost no customers in it, and it finished as the second largest fixed network in Greece.

The way it got out of Athens is the part I recognize. Dial-up did not spread by building anything; it spread by giving people a cheaper number to call. HOL extended its service to the rest of Greece using low-toll telephone numbers, and that was the whole expansion. Turkey worked the same way in the same years. I worked my way up from a 14.4k modem at home in 1998 to 56k a few years later, across two or three Turkish providers, and what actually decided the monthly cost was never the provider. It was the number, and what the telephone company charged you to hold it open. HOL's first product was not an internet service. It was a phone number with a good tariff behind it.

The corporate half of the story is a decade of buying. Eurobank sold the company to Intracom, which had it fully inside Intracom Holdings by 2006. In 2007 HOL paid 46.3 million euros for all of Attica Telecom, then the largest fiber operator inside the city of Athens, and in June of the same year signed a partnership with Vodafone Greece to sell ADSL bundles. In June 2008 it merged with Unibrain, a company already listed in Athens, and came out of it trading on the exchange under its own name.

By November 2008 it ran about 3,500 kilometers of fiber and the second largest backbone in the country, behind only OTE, the incumbent. It had physical equipment in enough unbundled exchanges to cover more than 80 percent of the population of Athens and more than 70 percent of Thessaloniki. In 2009 it launched an IPTV service called hol my tv. In the first half of 2014 it reported 28 million euros of operating profit on a 25.9 percent margin, which is a healthy company, and healthy companies of that size in a country in the fifth year of a depression get bought.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the phone number was the product ~

Unbundling is what let HOL become a network rather than a reseller. Greek regulation, following the European rules, obliged OTE to let competitors install their own equipment in its exchanges and take over the copper pair running to a subscriber's apartment. Every one of those 531,563 lines was a piece of OTE's copper with HOL's electronics on the end of it. That is a real business and it is also a permanently rented one.

Turkey never made that trade. The copper stayed effectively with the incumbent, and picking a provider here mostly meant picking whose logo was on the bill for the same line. The result is that Greece got a genuine second backbone and a company that could buy a fiber operator in its own capital, while the Turkish market produced resellers. The Greek version ended by being absorbed into a multinational. The Turkish version mostly never started.

~ the fiber under athens ~

The Attica Telecom purchase in 2007 is the detail that separates HOL from the dial-up generation it came out of. Most first-wave ISPs in Europe died or were sold before they owned anything heavier than a router. HOL spent 46.3 million euros on ducts and glass under the streets of Athens. That purchase, plus its own long-haul build out to Thessaloniki and Patras, got it to the point where it could backhaul its own traffic without leasing capacity from the company it was competing against. In certain years it leased its spare capacity back out to others.

~ five days in october ~

Vodafone Greece agreed on 22 August 2014 to buy 72.7 percent of the share capital from Intracom Holdings and World Equities Investments Holdings, for 72.7 million euros in cash. Completion in the fourth quarter took Vodafone to 91.2 percent, then a mandatory offer took it the rest of the way. On 5 October 2015 the consumer brand was retired in a single announcement: every fixed-line and internet plan hellas online had sold became Vodafone Home, and hol my tv became Vodafone TV. The company itself was wound into Vodafone-Panafon by a merger registered in the Greek commercial registry on 31 March 2016.

The domain hol.gr does not resolve at all now. There is one small leftover: hellasonline.gr still answers, with 117 bytes of black background and white text reading No forwarding set for hellasonline.gr. Somebody is still paying the registrar for a name that has been told to point at nothing, which is a more accurate memorial than a parked lander would have been.

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