Ireland On-Line

» see iol.ie as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ireland On-Line was formed in 1992 by Barry Flanagan, out of Galway, at a point when the Irish internet was a handful of academic connections and not much else. It was the first commercial internet service provider in the state. In January 1994 it launched what Personal Computer World described at the time as Ireland's first mass-market internet service, which in practice meant a phone number, a modem bank and a monthly bill for anyone who wanted one, rather than an account you needed a university to get.

The ownership then moved faster than the technology. An Post, the national postal service, bought the company in 1997 for IR£2.5 million. Two years later it sold to Esat Telecom Group for IR£115 million, a forty-six-fold markup on a business that had not changed shape in the interval. What had changed was the market's opinion about how much a subscriber base was worth. A year after that, BT Group took over Esat, and in 2002 the whole Irish operation was rebranded Esat BT, which is when the IOL name stopped being on the front of anything.

The end came in July 2009. BT Ireland pulled out of retail telecoms entirely and transferred its retail operations, along with everyone who had once been an Ireland On-Line customer, to Vodafone Ireland. The deal was reported on 23 July. Nobody shut a service down as such. A wholesale company decided consumers were not its business anymore and the last thread back to 1992 was cut by a transfer agreement.

~ the case file ~

~ what a country's first isp is for ~

Every country has one of these and they all have roughly the same biography. Somebody technical gets a leased line before the incumbent telco understands why anyone would want one, resells it by the hour, and spends four or five years being the only option. Then the phone company notices, the price collapses, and the pioneer gets bought by whoever wants the customer list. IOL did the whole arc between 1992 and 1999.

I came online in 1998 in Turkey, on a 33.6k modem, and the providers I dialed were Superonline and then TTNet. Different country, same shape: a private outfit ahead of the incumbent for a few years, then the incumbent's own brand on everything. What Ireland got that Turkey did not was a state postal service briefly owning its internet. An Post held IOL for two years and sold it for forty-six times what it paid, and I still find that the strangest sentence in this obituary.

~ the two-year markup ~

IR£2.5 million in 1997 and IR£115 million in 1999 is not a story about Ireland On-Line getting better. It is a snapshot of the window in which telecoms subscribers were repriced across Europe, and it lands almost exactly on the peak. Esat Telecom itself was swallowed by BT the following year for well over four billion. The company that had been a Galway startup in 1992 spent the back half of the decade being a line item in progressively larger acquisitions, and each buyer cared about it slightly less than the one before.

~ what iol.ie is now ~

Type iol.ie into a browser today and you land on a third-party webmail login for legacy addresses. Not a homepage, not a farewell notice, just a form for people who have had the same email address since the 1990s and never moved it. Oceanfree.net, the free-access brand that sat alongside it, ended up in the same condition.

That is the normal fate of an ISP that got absorbed rather than closed. The dial-up went, the portal went, the brand went, and what survived is the one thing that would break somebody's life if you switched it off.

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