UK Online

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

~ the obit ~

UK Online started in 1994 as a dial-up provider, which in Britain that year meant a modem, a local rate number and a monthly bill that still felt like a luxury item. Easynet bought it in 1996, and for most of the next decade it sat as an ordinary name on an ordinary list of British ISPs.

Then November 2004 happened. UK Online launched a 1Mb ADSL product, which was unremarkable, and then in the same month launched an 8Mb consumer service at £39.99 a month, which was not. The BBC covered it. Eight megabits was a number British households were not being offered anywhere, and the price sat inside the range people were already paying for considerably less. It only worked in exchanges where Easynet had unbundled the local loop, and everywhere else you got a normal BT wholesale product with a normal number attached. The exchanges where it did work were enough to move the market.

Competitors reacted. Telewest announced speed upgrades on cable, and a round of investment went through the British ISP business that had not been on anybody's schedule. When ADSL2+ cleared regulatory approval, UK Online was among the first to sell services up to 22Mb on a national scale, again on Easynet's unbundled estate. For a couple of years, a mid-sized provider that almost nobody outside Britain had heard of was selling the fastest consumer connection in the country.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the new owner ~

BSkyB bought Easynet in October 2005 for the unbundling estate, not for the brands hanging off it. Sky wanted to sell broadband to its own television subscribers and needed exchanges to sell it from. UK Online carried on as a separate entity next to Sky Broadband, which is a comfortable position right up until it isn't.

In January 2008, UK Online and Easynet launched Easynet Connect for small businesses. That spring UK Online announced that domain registration and commercial web hosting were coming. The pre-registration page and every mention of those products were quietly removed from the site in May or June of 2008. Nothing was said about it.

~ the slow part ~

By September 2009 the online signup form had stopped working. It told you it could not confirm some information about your current connection and gave you an 0800 number to call instead. People called the 0800 number and were told the ordering systems were being updated and no orders could be placed. That state simply persisted. An ISP that cannot take a new customer is no longer a business, it is an outstanding obligation, and Sky ran it in that condition for over a year.

In November 2010 the homepage finally said the thing out loud: Sky was closing UK Online, and all services would end on 21 January 2011. By February the site had been cut down to a single sentence, UK Online is now closed.

~ the messy bit ~

The closure did not close cleanly. Customers reported that their phone lines still had ADSL flagged as active at the exchange after service had stopped, which meant they could not be migrated anywhere else. No connection from UK Online, no connection from Sky, and no way to leave, because as far as the network was concerned they had never left. Getting off a dead ISP turned out to be harder than getting off a live one.

~ where i was ~

Britain in November 2004 was being offered eight megabits for forty pounds. I got TTNet broadband around 2006, and the tiers on offer in Turkey then started a long way below that. This is the ordinary kind of distance, measured in megabits and exchange equipment rather than in culture, and it is the sort you only feel afterward. Nobody on a Turkish line in 2004 knew what a British line cost or carried. You find that out years later, reading about a company that has already closed.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »