RelayOne

» see relayone.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The problem RelayOne solved was real and it was everywhere in 1998: you were online and the person you needed to reach was not. In Turkey that year I was fourteen, getting on with a modem that topped out at 33.6k, and almost nobody in my family had an address to send anything to. The Turkish answer to that gap was the one it had always been, the post office and, if it was urgent, a telegram. The british answer was to let Royal Mail carry the last part of the trip.

You composed a message, sent it to RelayOne, and Royal Mail printed it in London and dropped it into the ordinary mail. £1.50 a page, or up to fifty pages for £5, which was expensive against a stamp and cheap against the alternative of owning a printer, an envelope and the will to walk to a postbox. Greeting cards were added later, printed and posted the same way. Royal Mail's own description of the service was a modern-day telegram, which is a good line and also a warning, given what had happened to telegrams.

Microsoft was the technology partner, and the plan in april 1998 was to take it to the United States. Nothing in the record says the american launch ever happened. What the record does say is that a state postal operator and the largest software company in the world put their names on the same hybrid mail service and could not make it pay in a market of sixty million people.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

Hybrid mail was not a new idea in 1998 and it is not a dead one now. Bulk versions of it print millions of bank statements and utility bills every day, and the economics work fine at that scale because the sender is a company with a database. RelayOne pointed the same machinery at individuals, which is where it fell apart. One person sending one letter cannot amortize anything.

The pricing shows the squeeze. £1.50 for a page in 1998 was roughly five times a first-class stamp, and the customer was paying it to avoid a walk. Nobody who could not be bothered to post a letter was going to pay a premium to have somebody else post it, and the people who genuinely needed paper output, businesses with mailing lists, were served by contract services that never touched a consumer web page.

~ the funny part ~

Royal Mail told The Register the service had been up and running for "the last 18 months or so", which does not match the march 1998 launch in the contemporaneous coverage. Two years of trading had already compressed into eighteen months in the memory of the organization running it, in the week it was shutting it down. Nobody was lying. It was simply that small.

The volume number is the one that stays with you. At the end RelayOne was handling 400 items a month. Royal Mail was moving tens of millions of items a day in that period. The internet service its own press office was calling proof of a commitment to new technology was moving less traffic than a single village postbox.

~ what remains ~

It closed cleanly. Orders stopped in the last week of july 2000, the service went dark on thursday 3 august, and no jobs were lost because there had never been enough work in it to employ anybody properly. The free version for sending letters to British forces serving overseas kept running, which is the part that had a reason to exist that was not commercial.

What RelayOne was actually early to is the thing every company now buys from a vendor: an API that turns a message into a physical letter. That business is alive and worth money, and it is sold to software, not to people. The version aimed at a person with a modem and a relative who was not online had a two-year window, and it needed the whole country to be in that position at once. By 2000 the country was already moving out of it.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »