Pegasus Networks

» see pegasus.oz.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 14 September 1989 a small group held a launch event in the rainforest at Terania Creek in northern New South Wales, with a laptop computer and a modem connected to a cellular phone, the whole thing powered off a solar bus. A technician had built a box so the modem could talk to the handset, and Telstra had to make last-minute changes to let a data call reach Austpac from the cellular network, because nobody had done it before. The ABC's 7:30 Report covered it. Pegasus Networks had actually started carrying local traffic in June, but this was the part with a camera on it.

Austpac was how a tiny operation got national coverage without building anything: customers dialed a local number and Telstra billed Pegasus for the packet network, and Pegasus billed the customers. There were three dialup numbers, one for each modem speed from 300 baud up to 2400, so you called the one that matched your hardware. Founding chief executive Ian Peter had heard about the Association for Progressive Communications in 1988 and wanted an Australian node on it, which is the reason the thing existed at all.

What it carried was not general consumer traffic, at least not at first. Pegasus was a gateway for the environment and human rights movements, and for the peace and labor groups working alongside them, and it built named sub-networks for all of it: Earthnet, Landcarenet, Councilnet from October 1992 for municipal government, Artsnet, AOLIN for open learning, and ACSLink for the Australian Computer Society from September 1994. It was a founding member of APC and it ran Pactok, a 1990 alliance with people doing NGO work across the Asia Pacific.

~ the dossier ~

~ a bus in the rainforest ~

Byron Bay turned out to be a bad place to keep computers running, and after frying a few machines and losing a few customers the operation moved to Brisbane around the end of 1992, first to Fortitude Valley and later to Southbank. At the end of its third year it had close to 2,000 users, a substantial bank loan, eight full-time staff and a small profit. Peter stood down as chief executive at that point and Paul Wilson took over, later going on to APNIC.

~ the networks inside the network ~

Pegasus was registered as an AARNet affiliate in 1991 at peg.pegasus.oz.au, and through an arrangement sponsored by Melbourne University it fed off the AARNet backbone for its overseas traffic. By 1992 it claimed several thousand users nationally. For a window there, Ian Peter reckoned, Pegasus had 85 percent of the Australian internet market, which says less about Pegasus than about how small the market was.

That ended quickly. Connect.com arrived in 1992, then Magnadata and OzEmail, and when the web took off locally in 1995 Telstra's Big Pond and other well capitalized entrants came in behind them. By then there were roughly 800 Australian ISPs. Pegasus grew to 30 staff and 12,000 customers, which was a real business, and was still one of the country's three largest providers until 1995.

~ the capital that never came ~

Peter's own account of why it ended is unusually direct, and it does not blame the market. He put the demise down to avoidable lack of capitalization and some lack of vision. Investors willing to pay a fair price for shares were available; the principal shareholder did not want to dilute his holding. So while competitors expanded, Pegasus took an attempt at immediate profits over further investment, and the people who could have run the next stage of expansion started leaving.

The failure showed up as service quality. Just after winning the Australian Computer Society's national membership, which should have been the platform for the next phase, the network began suffering clogged bandwidth and poor performance, and Peter believed that more than anything is what finished it. Microplex bought the company, one of roughly twelve large ISPs it acquired before selling the lot to Optus. Roger Clarke's history dates the Microplex purchase to 1996 and Microplex's absorption into OptusNet to 1998; the APC's memorial for Peter says Optus in 1997. The Australian branch of APC was founded in 1997 specifically to carry on the work after Pegasus closed. That founding statement is the nearest thing to a death notice anyone put on the record.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »