Easynet

Easynet was founded on 1 August 1994 by David Rowe and Keith Teare, with the office based at 44-46 Whitfield Street, London. This was located above what would later become the UK's first internet café Cyberia, London, with Easynet supplying Cyberia's internet access.[2]

In March 1996 Easynet floated on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) at 100 pence per share, thereby raising £2.6 million. Then in July 1996 Easynet acquired Pavilion, a small ISP with 1,600 subscribers, for £215,000. However by September 1996 and just six months after the float, the share price had fallen to 38.5 pence per share. This was attributed at the time to bad press, general deterioration in the technology market, and increased losses.

On 23 January 2001 Easynet became the first operator in mainland U.K. to unbundle a local loop of copper wire from British Telecom's network and provide its own broadband service over it. [3] Later in 2004, Easynet was the first to challenge British Telecom in the wholesale broadband market when it announced its 8Mbps LLUStream service.[4]

In June 2001 Easynet acquired Ipsaris from Marconi Communications. Ipsaris was a network provider owning one of the largest backbones in the UK at the time, with 350,000 kilometres of optical fibre running alongside the UK canal network. [5] [6]

On 16 March 2004 Easynet acquired Novaxess Beheer B.V., a Dutch broadband company that had at the time unbundled 84 exchanges across the Netherlands and supplied 4,500 business customers. The deal was worth £26.2 million and was partly financed by a vendor placing of 6.35 million new shares in Easynet at a minimum price of 130 pence per share. [7]

Easynet was purchased and owned by British Sky Broadcasting, from 2006 to 2010. Under Sky, much of the original innovation was lost, but the brand continued. In 2010 BSkyB sold the Easynet brands and customer base to Lloyds Development Capital (LDC), the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group.[8]

In 2013 LDC sold its stake in Easynet to MDNX, backed by private equity firm Equistone Partners Europe who took a majority stake in the newly formed group. This new group would continue to trade under the Easynet brand.[9]

In October 2015 the Easynet Group of companies was acquired by Interoute for £402 million.[10]

A pair of Easynet floppy discs

Dynablock is a name which was used by Easynet from 2001 to 2003 for their Dialup Users List DNSBL of Internet addresses that appeared to be assigned dynamically, i.e. to dialup and residential broadband users.

Updates of Dynablock stopped December 2003 but it became the basis for NJABL and SORBS own dynamic IP lists. The dynamic list parts of NJABL and SORBS have been developed independently since then, with NJABL using the 'dynablock' name for their list.

In early 2007, NJABL passed their data along to The Spamhaus Project,[11] for using in their PBL service.[12]

Banned Easynet advert - Dec 2002

In 2002, a campaign created by HHCL for Easynet's broadband services showed both male and female bosses punching their employees for wasting company money, and employees punching their bosses for slow internet speeds. One of the advertisements which appeared in the London Evening Standard, showed a man being punched in the face by his male boss, with the slogan: "When your MD finds out you're spending up to 85% too much on your internet connection". A second advertisement showed an image of a woman punching a man in the face with the slogan: "When your employees discover that their internet connection could be 140 times faster". The Advertising Standards Authority banned these adverts ruling that they could cause serious or widespread offence, and that they condoned violence and anti-social behavior. [13]