Unisource

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

~ the eulogy ~

The sentence that kills it is buried in an exhibit to an American filing. A deed of amendment signed on 30 March 2001 by Infonet, Telia, KPN and Swisscom opens with a recital: Unisource N.V. was demerged within the meaning of the Dutch Civil Code with effect from June 1, 2000, zero hours, and from that moment Unisource N.V. ceased to exist. Three state telephone companies signing a contract about something else, agreeing in passing on the minute their joint venture stopped being a thing.

It had started with two of them. On 24 April 1992 PTT Telecom of the Netherlands and Swedish Telecom International, a subsidiary of the body that became Telia, set up a fifty-fifty company to pool their international value-added networks. Swiss PTT came into a subsidiary that November and into the parent itself on 1 July 1993. Telefonica of Spain was last in, taking twenty-five percent in June 1995 in exchange for two of its own subsidiaries, and it was also first out: on 18 April 1997 it announced an alliance with BT, and by Unisource's own account it never attended another decision-making body of the company after that day. It sold its shares back before the year ended.

What the three remaining owners were trying to build was a single European carrier for multinational customers, the thing that BT and MCI were building as Concert and that France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Sprint were building as Global One. The European Commission exempted the arrangement for five years from 1 July 1996 and attached four conditions and four obligations to it, including a ban on cross-subsidy and a requirement to report every six months. The exemption had a year still to run when the company it covered was dissolved.

~ the dossier ~

~ eleven salesmen in one room ~

By 1994 it was turning over 933 million guilders and losing 41 million of them. Revenue reached about $1.2 billion in 1996 against a net loss of $194 million, which the company attributed to building out its backbone, and its chief financial officer told reporters in June 1997 that the deepest part of the investment curve had been reached. Revenue then went to roughly 1.3 billion euro in 1998 and the loss went past 150 million. Break-even had been forecast for the end of the century on ten billion guilders of revenue. It never came close.

The sharpest contemporary account of why is Dutch, from November 1998, and it is about selling rather than about networks. The offering was thin and so was the customer list: an attractive shop window with a much weaker store behind it. The sales organizations of the parent companies kept colliding, and in one meeting with a single large customer, eleven representatives from different parts of the group turned up without knowing of each other's existence. KPN's chairman put it more diplomatically the following May, calling the cooperation inside the alliance too lethargic.

~ sold for parts in 1999 ~

The break-up ran faster than the build. AT&T, which had taken forty percent of the Uniworld joint venture rather than of Unisource itself, handed its stake back on 29 May 1999 and the Commission waved the exit through in July. Unisource Carrier Services, the carrier business the three parents had merged into one unit from 1 January 1998 and run out of Wallisellen near Zurich, went to Energis of Britain on 2 August 1999 for something around sixty million pounds; the German and Italian trade press put the price nearer a hundred million dollars, so the figure depends on who you read. D-Plus went to Mobilcom for $284.8 million and was described as the sixth and last subsidiary sold that year.

Brussels caught up on 29 December 2000. The decision repealing the 1997 exemption records what the owners told it: that market developments and accumulated losses had forced them to abandon Unisource as the vehicle for their international expansion, and that each parent would now address those markets alone. The same document is formally addressed to Unisource NV at an address in Hoofddorp and says the company will continue to exist as a holding for the joint ownership of AUCS, which by then it had not done for seven months.

~ the code Telia left running ~

unisource.com still resolves, on a Telia nameserver, and answers HTTP 410 Gone while serving Telia Company's own homepage out of Solna. The registration dates from June 1997 and runs to 2027. Four hundred and ten is the code for a resource that is gone and is not coming back, which is a deliberate thing to configure on a name its owner has held since 1997 and has renewed out to 2027.

A customer of this company had a procurement department and offices in nine countries, which described nobody I knew in 1998. The retail end, the part an ordinary person pays a bill to, stayed behind in each country under its own old name. What carries across the distance is the ambition: four state monopolies, each the only telephone company its country had ever had, deciding that the way through deregulation was to become a single company, and then failing to agree on which of them should walk into the customer's office.

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