Virgin.net

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

~ how it landed ~

My dial-up bills came from TTNet, with a Turknet stretch in between. Britain had a completely different set of names for the identical service, and Virgin.net was the one with the best marketing behind it, because it was the only provider in the country that turned up pre-attached to an airline and a record shop. That is a real advantage when the product itself is a phone number and a login prompt.

It launched in november 1996 as a joint venture between NTL, the cable company, and Branson's Virgin Group. NTL supplied the boring half. Virgin supplied a brand that a British household already trusted for things that had nothing to do with each other, and Branson himself did the launch publicity, because he always did.

It grew the way every British ISP grew in that window. Around 145,000 users at the end of 1998, then roughly 600,000 dial-up subscribers by the middle of 2001. The engine underneath that growth was the free-ISP model that Freeserve had proved in 1998: drop the subscription, take a cut of the metered local call the customer was making anyway. For a couple of years the United Kingdom had the strangest internet economics in Europe, and the whole country signed up at once.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the awkward middle ~

The problem with an ISP whose asset is a borrowed name is that the name is on loan. Virgin.net was never really Virgin's business and never really NTL's either, and after the dial-up boom broke it sat there as a mid-sized narrowband operator watching broadband arrive on infrastructure it did not own.

It did sell ADSL eventually, up to 8 Mbit down over BT lines, plus telephone service through carrier preselect. That is a reseller's product line. NTL, which had actual cable in the ground, was selling the same customers something better under a different brand, so the awkwardness was structural. In september 2004 NTL bought the remaining stake and took the whole thing in-house. It had about 590,000 customers on the day of that deal, barely different from three years earlier.

~ the day the name moved ~

NTL and Telewest merged in march 2006, and then the merged company did something unusual: it licensed a consumer brand it did not own and retired both of the ones it did. Virgin Media launched in february 2007. NTL and Telewest were retired into it, and Virgin.net disappeared inside the same announcement.

So Virgin.net is a strange grave. The brand did not die, it got promoted. The company that had carried it for ten years was folded into a business many times its size, and the name went onto the front of a cable network and a mobile operator. What actually ended in february 2007 was the ISP itself, the customer base and the platform that answered when you dialed.

~ the long tail ~

The legacy ADSL customers stayed on the old platform for years, faintly embarrassing inside a cable company. In november 2014 Virgin Media agreed to sell that business to TalkTalk, and the migrations ran from february 2015. That is the honest end date for anyone who was still paying: close to twenty years after some of them first signed up to a Virgin ISP, they woke up as TalkTalk customers.

virgin.net redirects to virginmedia.com now. Somewhere in Britain there are people still typing an @virgin.net address into forms, which is the most durable thing any dial-up provider ever produced.

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