PSINet

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

~ the obituary ~

psinet sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cant personally remember. when i went online from home in 1998 the isp was a turkish dial-up service. the upstream providers had names i never knew. somewhere out past their border routers, psinet was one of the big carriers in the us, but for a teenager in ankara dialing 33.6 it was a name on a research paper, not on a bill.

the company started in december 1989 as performance systems international, a spinout from nysernet, the new york state research network. martin schoffstall and bill schrader were the founders. they funded the early company by maxing credit cards and selling a car. the bet was that someone would pay for commercial internet access if a company built the lines and the modems to deliver it.

the bet worked for about a decade. by 1999 psinet was the largest independent isp in the country, with a number-two position in japan and points of presence on five continents. it had also bought the naming rights to the baltimore ravens stadium for $105 million. that stadium kept the psinet name for a year, then a year of awkward signage after the bankruptcy.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

psinet's actual contribution was proving a private isp could exist. for most of the 80s the internet was something only universities and government labs used, and the official nsf backbone had an acceptable use policy that banned commercial traffic. psinet, along with uunet and a few others, built parallel commercial infrastructure without that restriction. by 1995 the nsfnet itself was retired and the commercial isps inherited the whole thing.

the boom years were 1996 to 1999. psinet went public and bought rivals across canada and europe. it lit up its own fiber rings and signed backbone deals with a lot of consumer services people had never heard of. the headquarters in ashburn, virginia sat at what would later be called data center alley, the densest concentration of cloud infrastructure in the world. psinet was there first.

~ the actual end ~

the problem was the debt. psinet had borrowed about $3.7 billion to buy fiber and equipment during the bubble, on the assumption that traffic would keep doubling and revenue would catch up. when the bubble broke in 2000 the revenue did not. customers stopped signing up, and the equipment vendors stopped extending credit. the long-haul fiber that everyone had spent billions on turned out to be a glut, not a shortage.

psinet filed chapter 11 on june 1, 2001. the us operations went to cogent communications for $9.5 million in april 2002, paid in stock. the european piece was sold to interoute, with telus picking up canada. the ravens stadium contract was renegotiated. the founders walked away with not much.

~ what carried over ~

ashburn stayed. the data centers that psinet anchored in loudoun county are now the largest cluster of internet exchange points and cloud regions on the planet. about 70 percent of the world's internet traffic goes through that piece of virginia. psinet does not get the credit. the ground was prepared.

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