Pacnet

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

~ the last words ~

Pacnet was assembled out of two separate disasters. The first was Asia Global Crossing, the Asian arm of the fiber build-out that went under in 2002; its cable assets were bought out of the wreckage by a China Netcom-led consortium for around US$120 million and renamed Asia Netcom, which then changed hands again in 2006 for US$402 million. The second was less dramatic. Pacific Internet was incorporated in Singapore on 28 March 1995 as Sembawang Media, took its better-known name in 1998, listed on Nasdaq in February 1999, and was taken private and delisted in 2007. Both ended up under the same owner, Connect Holdings, which was itself backed by a group of distressed-debt funds.

Their owner put them together in January 2008 and called the result Pacnet. On paper it made sense. Asia Netcom had the wet plant, two intersecting submarine cable systems covering the Japan-to-Singapore corridor, and Pacific Internet had customers in seven markets plus the retail and enterprise sales machinery that a pure cable operator lacks. In practice it was a wholesale and enterprise carrier carrying a consumer ISP on its hip, trading under a name that was only seven years old when it ended.

Telstra announced the purchase on 23 December 2014 at US$697 million, a figure that included roughly US$400 million of gross debt, and completed it on 16 April 2015. By then Pacnet had more than 46,000 km of cable, 29 data centers, 109 points of presence, about 815 staff across 25 offices in 11 countries, and revenue of US$472 million for the twelve months to December 2013. Telstra's people said on the day that the brand would be "progressively retired", and progressively is what happened: the pacnet.com homepage went on serving a Pacnet site through December 2015 and was redirecting to telstraglobal.com by early January 2016.

~ the record ~

~ the cables ~

The two cable systems are older than the company that became famous for owning them. C2C was built by a consortium in which SingTel held 59 percent, cost an initial US$2.1 billion, ran 17,000 km, and was ready for service on its northern loop on 5 December 2001 and in full on 28 January 2002. East Asia Crossing was Asia Global Crossing's own build, 19,800 km, an initial US$1.3 billion, ready for service on 26 August 2002. Both were commissioned at the exact moment the market for transpacific and intra-Asian bandwidth fell through the floor, which is how one owner ended up with both of them at a fraction of what they cost.

Asia Netcom merged the two into a single 36,800 km network in 2007, and in 2010 added EAC Pacific, 9,620 km of capacity on the Unity cable across the Pacific. That is the asset Telstra actually bought. It is still in the water, still carrying traffic up and down the coast between Tokyo and Singapore, and it has an Australian carrier's name on the invoice.

~ the dial-up half ~

The half of Pacnet that ordinary people ever touched was the half that lost its name. Pacific Internet was one of Asia's early consumer ISPs, selling access in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, the Philippines, India, Thailand and Malaysia, and its annual report for 2003 counted 359,226 dial-up subscribers against 37,100 on broadband. That ratio is the whole of the early 2000s in one line: a third of a million people across those seven markets still dialing in, and a tenth that many on anything faster.

Southeast Asian dial-up was not a market I had any view into. Across the same years I was moving from a 33.6k modem to a 56k one on a Turkish line, paying by the minute for the privilege, and the ISPs whose names I knew were TTNet and Superonline. The experience was presumably close to identical and the brands were entirely foreign to each other. When Telstra came in, the Singapore and Thailand retail pieces were sold off separately and ended up trading as Pacific Internet again, so the older of the two names is arguably still alive and the newer one is the dead one.

~ the breach nobody owned ~

There is a coda to this that belongs in a security textbook. Someone got into Pacnet's corporate IT network through a SQL injection flaw on a web application server, and had complete access to the administrative and email systems. Pacnet closed the hole on 3 April 2015. Telstra has said it learned about the intrusion on 16 April, the day the acquisition completed and the day the whole mess became its own.

Telstra disclosed it publicly around 20 May and was admirably blunt about what it did not know: the logs would not tell it what had been taken, and it had no evidence that anything had been. A breach surfacing on the exact day a network changes owner is the worst possible timing for finding out what your due diligence missed. pacnet.com has not served a page of its own in a decade.

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