Internet America

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

~ the goodbye ~

My dial-up years ran on TTNet and Superonline, which is the Turkish version of the same story: a phone line and a modem that climbed from 14.4k to 56k across a few years. Internet America was the Texas version, and the Texas version had a stock ticker.

It started in January 1995. Robert Maynard Jr. founded it, and the piece everybody in the state actually remembers is not the service but the phone number: 1-800-BE-A-GEEK, which dials out to 1-800-232-4335 and sat at the top of the homepage for years afterward. That is what a consumer ISP had to do in 1995. You were selling a product most of your customers could not describe.

The company went public on 11 December 1998, in the window when going public was simply what internet companies did. The stock rose 14.4 percent on the first day of trading, which in that market counted as restrained.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the dot-com years ~

1999 was the year Internet America went shopping. It bought Compunet in February for about two million dollars, and CyberRamp in the same month. NeoSoft followed in July for 7.3 million in cash, then INTX.Networking in August from a founder named Sardar Biglari who would later become a well-known activist investor. In September it took PDQ.net in a stock deal worth 32 million, and the combined company had 145,000 subscribers.

In December 1999 the stock doubled in a single day with no news attached to it. CNN's after-hours column noted the move and had nothing to explain it with. That is the entire dot-com bubble compressed into one line, and it was also the high-water mark. On 14 August 2001, NASDAQ removed the shares from public listing.

~ what it became ~

Most ISPs from that cohort died in the two years after a delisting. Internet America did not. It cut headcount from 109 to 70 in 2003 and gave up office space. The headquarters moved from Dallas to Houston in 2006, and the company kept buying small operators whenever it could afford one.

The pivot that kept it breathing was fixed wireless. Rural Texas had no cable and thin DSL, so a company willing to put antennas on towers could sell broadband in places nobody else was trying to serve. By 2014 the company's own homepage described a business that had grown from 3,500 subscribers to about 26,000 active customers, covering small Texas towns and a piece of Joplin, Missouri. Those are not markets anybody was fighting over.

A merger with KeyOn Communications was announced in November 2008 and terminated in February 2009. In June 2009 the company hired a former Governor of Texas, Mark White, as special counsel on rural broadband development, which tells you where the money was expected to come from and that it did not arrive fast enough.

~ what remains ~

JAB Broadband bought Internet America on 23 July 2015 and folded it into Rise Broadband. The name went with the transaction. Twenty years and six months from the first dial-up account to a line item in somebody else's rural wireless portfolio.

The founder's second act outlived the company. Robert Maynard Jr. co-founded LifeLock, the identity-theft protection business, and resigned from it in 2007 after reporting surfaced that the Federal Trade Commission had previously barred him from the credit repair industry. Internet America had nothing to do with any of that. It is just the first line on the same resume.

What is actually gone here is a category. In 1995 you could start an internet company in Texas with a memorable phone number and sell access to your neighbors, and by 1999 you could take that public. There is no equivalent now. Access is a handful of national carriers and whatever municipal fiber project you are lucky enough to live inside. The local ISP with a joke in its phone number existed for roughly a decade, in Texas and in Turkey both.

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