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EBone/KPNQwest Network Shutting Down

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fasten-your-seatbelts dept.

reginald.barclay writes "As KPNQwest has filed for bankruptcy some time ago, also EBone, which they aquired some months ago, goes down the drain. Together, these two companies carried betwenn 1/3 and 1/2 of European IP Traffic (and, in the case of KPNQwest, an unknown portion of voice). Employees at Ebone were laid off last week and told to abandon their NOC. But instead of getting drunk and over with it, they occupied their former workplace. Now even their time is running out, and one of Europes oldest backbone carriers will probably be shut down today, at 1700 CET. I wonder how many of their customers (mostly ISPs and VBCs themselves) have managed to run to the competition in time. Nevertheless, I expect the routing in large parts of Europe to be very interesting (in the chinese sense, of course) over the coming weekend and early next week." Update: 06/14 18:02 GMT by M : Apparently KPNQwest's creditors have agreed to pay to keep the place going until the end of June.

9 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. 25%-50% of traffic on Ebone? by pieterh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm sitting in an office in Brussels, it will be interesting to see how stopping this backbone affects the Internet in Europe. The BBD reported that Ebone carries 25%, their website reports 50%, of traffic in Europe.

    Anyone tried this kind of nuclear blast on th Internet before?

    --
    My blog
  2. healthy business plans by stock · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If a new company presents a business plan
    to their potential investers, then the investors
    decide if its a healthy business plan, and either
    say yes or no. If a business plan is actually
    a vapourware plan, like most .COM startups were,
    then these same investors should have said that
    its a nogo.

    So today these same investers are loosing
    a rather large amount of money. Now who
    is to blame in then end?

    Robert

  3. And if you think you're unaffected... by bryanp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    because you don't live in Europe, think again.

    I live in Tennessee, but my email provider (Runbox.com) is based in Norway. Fortunately they managed to get their stuff together and should* be safe.

    *should: a moral term that has nothing to do with computers. "It' should work." is a worthless statement.

    --
    "An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
  4. Network won't be down long. by peterdaly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For better or worse, a couple large networking companies in my aread have gone out business recent, one of whom is our upstream provider. Unlinke what sounds like may happen in this case, we had zero downtime. Another company bought the network for pennies on the dollar. Only way we can tell anything changes is we havn't gotten a bill for two months because the new company doesn't have their act together in that regard yet.

    Similar thing happened with the major compition to Verizon. They went out of business, and to the best of my knowledge their customers who have not left (many did), have not lost service, although that whole fiasco is not finished.

    Anyway, chances are, another large networking company will buy the network for almost nothing, and pick up where the existing company left off...just with much lower capital investments, which may lead to lower prices.

    I for one believe things like this are a mixed blessing, and in some cases needed to lower the cost structure for providing these services. Kinda like a built in cost correction.

    I may be way off base with this, but that's what I think base on what I have seen locally.

    -Pete

    --
    Soccer Goal Plans
  5. KPNQWest network will continue to run.... by Idaho · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...until clients find alternative solutions.

    Mind you, KPN (which owns 40% of KPNQWest shares) has several Really Big Contracts with rather big companies, such as Schiphol Airport (which also has a very big hosting colo), guaranteeing that the network will ALWAYS run, or they'll have to pay the damages of breaking their contract.

    So, as long as 'cost to keep the network running' < 'cost to piss off biggest customers REAL good', the network will keep running.

    You can check this article (in Dutch), which says at least the Belgian network will keep running. Short translation of the article: employees where working for free to keep the network up and running, now they have a temporary contract for a few weeks, guaranteeing them they'll get paid if they keep the network running.

    --
    Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
  6. More news: by bons · · Score: 5, Interesting
    How did this happen?

    quote: "According to information gathered by the group, the three executives awarded themselves ten-fold salary and bonus increases in May 2001, which were kept secret till the day after the sale of GTS's assets was announced. The three received a total of $21m (£14.7m) in 2001, a sum that amounted to 52 percent of the stock value of the company at the time, said Kaplan. By comparison, Enron's much criticized "loyalty bonuses" only amounted to a few percent of its value."

    --

    No Zen is good zen

  7. The rerouting has began... by ManiaX+Killerian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been doing traceroutes , and about 30 mins ago i saw the following:

    4 faste0-0-rtr13.Sofia.0rbitel.net (195.24.32.13) 6 ms
    5 Orbitel-BTCNET.btc-net.bg (212.39.66.137) 8 ms
    6 S5-1-0.PASAR2.Pastourelle.opentransit.net (193.251.248.85) 44 ms
    7 P0-0.PASBB2.Pastourelle.opentransit.net (193.251.128.81) 1002 ms
    8 P13-0.PASCR2.Pastourelle.opentransit.net (193.251.241.169) 2619 ms
    9 P11-0.PASCR1.Pastourelle.opentransit.net (193.251.241.97) 2674 ms

    and so on... looks like a lot of things moved in opentransit... Here's the trace from the other direction:

    8 P3-0.NYKCR3.New-york.opentransit.net (193.251.248.110) 13 ms
    9 P11-0.NYKCR2.New-york.opentransit.net (193.251.241.217) 16 ms
    10 P4-0.PASCR1.Pastourelle.opentransit.net (193.251.241.133) 100 ms
    11 P12-0.PASCR2.Pastourelle.opentransit.net (193.251.241.98) 100 ms
    12 P7-0.PASBB2.Pastourelle.opentransit.net (193.251.241.170) 100 ms
    13 P8-0-0.PASAR2.Pastourelle.opentransit.net (193.251.128.82) 2682 ms
    14 Btc.GW.opentransit.net (193.251.248.86) 2701 ms

    Let's hope they'll sort it out in the next 3-4 days.

  8. Beligian Government should simply take it over. by uncoveror · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Belgian Government, either unilaterally or on the behalf of the European Union, should simply take this NOC over. Nationalize it. The backbone is too important to let anyone just pull the plug on it. Some things are just too important to be left to greedy businessmen. Kudos to the former employees who have kept the network up as volunteers because it was neccesary and the right thing to do.

    --
    The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
  9. Re:Lack of solid facts by Spruitje · · Score: 3, Interesting


    It's on The Register [theregister.co.uk] too

    Well, according to mtr www.theregister.co.uk is now 28 hops away.
    Traffic is now routed from chellonetworks to alter.net.
    Instead of the normal 6 hops.
    O yeah, it is routed from Amsterdam to London, then to New York, Washington and then back to London and to www.theregister.co.uk.
    I can't imagen that this is the fastest route...
    But to be fair i'm using an UPC/Chello connection.