Madasafish

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

~ the eulogy ~

You cannot import an isp. The product is a local phone number plus somebody in a call center who speaks your language, which is why every country got its own set of names and why almost none of those names ever traveled. In 1999 the ones on my side of the screen were TTNet and Superonline, dialed at 33.6k. Madasafish belonged to a list i had no reason to ever read.

It launched that year from Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, about as far into the Outer Hebrides as a British company can reasonably put a business park. Iomart, founded the year before, ran it out of Gleann Seileach on the road toward Marybank. The offer was free internet access with no subscription, which in Britain in 1999 was the entire market, and the brand went national on television with an animated goldfish.

The name was the joke and the joke worked. Mad as a fish, with a cartoon fish on the screen and a call center on an island of twenty thousand people picking up the phone for customers in London. By early 2000 the national press had the parent valued at around sixty million pounds and preparing to raise twenty million more on a flotation.

~ the dossier ~

~ the passing around ~

None of that went the way it was drawn. The dot-com collapse took the free-access model with it and Madasafish spent the following years being sold. Centrica bought the Stornoway call center in 2002, when it employed forty people. The brand itself landed inside the Brightview group alongside Freenetname, and BT bought Brightview in July 2007. By the end of that year Madasafish had been folded in under Plusnet, which BT had already bought the year before.

The strange part is how long it survived after that. A brand with no marketing and no obvious reason to exist inside a company that already owned a better-known one kept billing customers for another eight years. Plusnet ran it quietly. The people on it stayed because their email address had their own name in front of the fish.

~ how it actually ended ~

Plusnet mailed the closure notice in September 2015 and named 15 December as the last day. That slipped, and the date on the final version is 11 January 2016. On 13 November every remaining customer contract was assigned across to Plusnet Plc, which is the paperwork step that tells you the decision had been made some time earlier. The letter was signed by Plusnet's chief operating officer and it made the offer plainly: move over, same company, better products.

Two details in it are worth keeping. Customers were told by email rather than by post, which for an isp closing an email service is a peculiar choice. And the notice carved out an exception: if you had an email-only account, nothing was going to happen to you.

~ the long tail ~

That exception is why the story does not stop in 2016. Madasafish addresses kept working for years after the isp had stopped selling anything, so people across Lewis and Harris were still receiving mail at a brand that no longer existed. In December 2024 island users reported weeks without access. By the middle of 2025 some of them could not receive mail at all, with nothing announced either way.

madasafish.com still answers in 2026. What it serves is the closure notice, freephone number included, telling you to call about moving your service to Plusnet. It has been the front page for more than ten years now, which is longer than the goldfish ever ran.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »