Pipex

» see pipex.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1990 i was six years old and Turkey did not have a commercial ISP for anyone to be the first of. My own connection story starts eight years later on a 14.4k modem, by which point pipex had already been founded, had already wired half the British internet industry, and had already been sold once. Everything in this grave happened somewhere i could not see it, on a national timeline that ran roughly a decade ahead of mine.

Peter Dawe set it up in 1990 inside Unipalm, a Cambridge software reseller, under the name The Public I.P. Exchange Ltd. The claim on it is that it was the first company in Britain to sell internet access commercially, at a time when the only real connectivity in the country belonged to JANET and JANET was for universities. Pipex existed because Dawe worked out that businesses would pay for the same thing, and that nobody was offering it to them.

By mid-1992 it was running a 64k leased line across the Atlantic to UUNET, which for a while was a meaningful share of the total capacity between Britain and the rest of the network. Its early customer list is the part that dates it best. Demon Internet bought transit from pipex before it went on to become the consumer ISP everybody in Britain remembers, and the BBC was on there too.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

In November 1994 pipex started the process that produced LINX, the London Internet Exchange, on the reasoning that British traffic between British networks should not have to cross an ocean and come back. That is an unglamorous piece of plumbing and it is the single most durable thing the company ever did.

The commercial peak came a year later. UUNet bought pipex in November 1995 for £150 million, which in 1995 was a serious number for a five-year-old British internet company, and the entity became UUNet Pipex before drifting through the MFS merger into WorldCom. The brand was later picked back up by David Rickards and his family as PIPEX Internet Ltd, which is how a name that had been absorbed by an American carrier ended up back on a British consumer ISP.

~ what got buried with it ~

The second life is a rollup story. In January 2002 pipex put £2 million into bringing 40,000 DSL customers online. In October 2003 GX Networks bought the company for £55 million and thought so much of the name that it renamed itself Pipex Communications plc. September 2006 brought two more acquisitions in the same month, Toucan for £24 million and Cable and Wireless's Bulldog Broadband for £12 million.

Then it unwound faster than it had assembled. The home broadband business went to Tiscali UK in July 2007 for £210 million. Pipex Wireless became Freedom4 that October, the business arm became Vialtus in February 2008, and in March 2008 the parent company quietly reverted to being GX Networks. Inside eight months the name had been stripped off every part of the company that had been built around it.

~ the inheritance ~

The consumer end took two more years to finish dying. Tiscali ran stealth migrations of pipex customers onto its own unbundled network through 2008, Carphone Warehouse bought Tiscali UK in June 2009, and in 2010 the whole inherited base was moved onto the TalkTalk brand. Plenty of people who had been with pipex since the nineties found out from a letter or from a change in the bill. The legal shell, Pipex Broadband Limited, was dissolved on 24 May 2012.

The email outlived all of it. TalkTalk was still running pipex.com mailboxes nine years after the brand stopped meaning anything, and in March 2019 they fell over for an entire weekend and made the trade press one last time. That is a fair ending for the country's first ISP: the company gone, the exchange it started still carrying most of British internet traffic, and the addresses still live enough to break.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »