TTNET

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

~ the last words ~

For most of ten years the name printed on my internet bill was TTNET. It was printed on nearly everyone else's too, and that is the company in one line. Türk Telekom owned the copper in the ground, TTNET rented that copper to households, and every private competitor also had to rent it from the same owner. That arrangement decided what the Turkish internet felt like from inside a living room for a decade.

The name is older than the company. In 1999 Türk Telekom stood up an IP backbone it called TTnet: three cities joined by a 34 Mbit triangle, with a gigabit of international capacity behind it. The retail firm came seven years later. TTNET A.Ş. was founded on 26 April 2006 and licensed as an internet service provider on 14 May, a separate legal entity with its own license, created because the regulator wanted the line business kept at arm's length from the shop selling subscriptions on top of it.

The buildout that followed was the fastest thing in Turkish consumer technology. Dial-up gave way to ADSL and then to ADSL2+, and fiber arrived late but arrived quickly. By the end of 2015, its last full year, the group reported 8.0 million broadband connections with 1.5 million of those on fiber. For most street addresses in the country there was no real second choice, which is less a boast than a description of the market.

I got broadband at home around 2006, which means my own ADSL years and this company's entire life are the same ten years. The modem stayed in the same corner. The bill arrived with the same logo on it until one month it did not.

~ the record ~

~ the split ~

Turkey spent the 2000s trying to make one state company behave like a market. The instrument was separation: keep Türk Telekom as the owner of the physical loop, and put the retail internet business in a subsidiary with its own name, its own license and its own price list. TTNET was that subsidiary. Rival ISPs bought wholesale access from the parent and then competed against the parent's own child on retail price.

Anyone who watched Turkish ISPs die in that decade watched the same arithmetic. İxir burned through 72 million dollars and handed its subscribers to Superonline. Turk.net cost Ali Sabancı 25 million and survived by staying small. TTNET did not have to win that fight, because it was already standing on the thing the others were renting.

~ what an ISP sold you ~

It did not stay an access company. There was an email service and a hosted disk, an education platform for schoolchildren called TTNET Vitamin, and a television product, Tivibu, that eventually mattered more than the connection it rode on. In 2013 the company absorbed a Turkish game studio, Sobee. In 2014 it bought Champions League and Europa League broadcast rights for three seasons, which is a strange sentence to write about an internet provider and was completely normal at the time.

The logic was the one every incumbent ISP reached for once the line itself became a commodity: sell the pipe at cost, then sell things that only work if the customer is already on your pipe. Most of those products outlived the brand that launched them. Tivibu is still selling subscriptions. Muud is still selling music.

~ the day the name changed ~

On 26 January 2016 Türk Telekom decided to trade under one brand. TTNET went, and so did Avea, itself a name welded together in 2004 out of Aria and Aycell. From the 27th there was one store and one call center for everything. The chief executive made a point of saying the integration finished without a service interruption, which was true and was also the least interesting part.

This is the only kind of ISP death where nothing detectable happens to the customer. No migration window and no last day announced on a splash page. TTNET A.Ş. still exists as a legal entity inside the group, quietly holding contracts under a name nobody is allowed to print. The service continued exactly as before. The brand that had been in eight million Turkish households simply stopped being said out loud.

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