iPass

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

~ the last words ~

For my whole dial-up decade there was exactly one number my modem needed to know, and it belonged to whichever Turkish provider I was paying that year, TTNet mostly, Superonline before it. The problem iPass existed to solve was the opposite of mine. It sold to the person who woke up in a different country every week and needed a local number there too, and then a working connection in the hotel, and then one bill at the end of it that an accounting department would accept.

Chris Moore founded it in California in January 1996, and the product was never a network. It was a clearing house. iPass signed agreements with something like eight hundred internet providers around the world, wrote a client program that carried the whole directory of their access numbers, and handled the settlement between them afterward. A traveler in Osaka dialed a Japanese provider they had never heard of, authenticated with their own corporate credentials, and iPass paid the Japanese provider and invoiced the employer.

That was worth real money for about a decade. The company went public on Nasdaq on 24 July 2003 under IPAS, raising over a hundred million dollars, with quarterly revenue already up forty-six percent year on year and more than half a million business travelers on the network. Revenue peaked at $192 million in 2007. Every dollar of it was rented.

~ the record ~

~ the roaming problem ~

It is easy to forget how badly connected the connected class used to be. A salesperson landing in a city in 1999 had a laptop with an internal modem and no idea what a local internet provider in that city was called or what it charged. The hotel would happily sell them a phone line at a per-minute rate designed for people calling home.

iPass turned that into a login box. What it was really selling was not bandwidth but the removal of a decision, which is a business that only works while the decision is hard. Every year that getting online somewhere got easier, the product was worth slightly less, and the company spent twenty-three years running ahead of exactly that.

~ how the network worked ~

When dial-up died, iPass repeated the trick on Wi-Fi. It certified hotspots instead of modem pools and put the same client on phones as well as laptops, still selling the one promise of a single account everywhere. In August 2004 it added Connexion by Boeing, so the network technically covered aircraft in flight. It bought GoRemote in 2006 to absorb a competitor doing the same thing for remote offices.

The numbers kept getting bigger in a way that meant less each time. Thirty-five thousand hotspots in fifty-one countries in the mid 2000s, then 18 million, then 50 million after a roaming deal with Devicescape in 2015, then a claimed 64 million. A count like that is a measure of how many networks were willing to be resold, not of how many people needed a reseller. Revenue fell from $69.8 million in 2014 to $62.6 million in 2015, and the staff went from 250 down to 205.

~ the last dial tone ~

Gary Griffiths took over in 2015 and tried the correct pivots: a flat-rate iPass Unlimited so companies could stop counting minutes, and SmartConnect, which used a scoring model to pick which nearby network would actually work instead of just listing them. Both of those are good products. Neither answers the customer who has stopped paying for hotel internet because it is now free, and who tethers to a phone when it is not.

Pareteum agreed to buy the company in an all-stock deal in November 2018 and closed it on 12 February 2019, taking about sixty-seven percent of the shares in the exchange offer. iPass came off Nasdaq that day. Pareteum itself filed for Chapter 11 on 15 May 2022, and the iPass business was sold out of the bankruptcy to Channel Ventures Group that July, along with everything else that could be lifted out. The brand still exists somewhere inside a Dutch holding company. Type the domain today and there is nothing there to answer, not even a redirect.

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