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C&W Bails Out
norskode writes "Not much to go on yet, but it seems that Cable & Wireless is bailing out of their US operations. This is a big provider of IP pipes, and they run the data centers they bought from the failed Exodus folks. There are a LOT of sites that live in their data centers, but no word yet on the disposition of those facilities."
Another glitch in /. This is a subcriber posting...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
C&W pulling out, UUNet/WorldCom not doing real well, BBN getting sucked up by GTE... not much of the original backbones left it seems. Wonder how long until the US Internet is just an interconnection of all the telcos?
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
Gosh, they called my office about two months ago and said they were pulling our T1s and IPs. Maybe we just thought we heard them...?
A traceroute to google shows it's using cw.net and exodus.net
This could be bad...
Those data centers have nothing to worry about. Some company is going to buy all of that infrastructure & equipment for pennies on the dollar. It makes sense for them to leave it as is and transfer the existing customer base. Why would they reinvent the wheel if everything is already in place? No need to panic.
I distinctly hope it doesn't end up in the AOL/TW camp, after the media deregulation in the states that effectively lets them control the news.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
but here come the VCs. Vulture Capitalists that is.
The reason Ellen and her gang couldn't keep this running seemed to be they kept building new data centers. Capital costs were HUGE.
But C&W bought exodus. After the fallout. For very very cheap.
How could they not make a profit off this? Is maintaince costs still so high even with no expansion? They were CLOSING data centers not buiding them.
This worries me, because if after the initial build up is done, you still can't make money off a colo then that means prices are WAY too low and for the 2 or 3 colo's left, we are going to see prices sky-rocket to come up to meet expenses.
Sad day.
Back at the end of last year, we were alerted that C&W was selling their customers to New Edge Networks. Not happy.
(all the porn that will be lost in those defunct datacenters)
We must establish a plan of action, and organize to save the porn.
C&W is in the red, so to speak, hence the red bars!
Someone get a list of sites on their servers, so we can Slashdot them as a fairwell gift ;-)
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
It is an interesting problem that faces IT. The hospital I work at uses a mainframe on another site. We are planning to return it to on-site because we had downtime because the company moved their mainframe 'just because' from one side of Atlanta to another.
There is also the fun of who really owns your data? If the site just gets shutdown, how will you get data? (I know they should give it to you in tapes, but then you must find something they will work on.)
In God we trust, all others require data.
According to the article, C&W posted a net loss of 6.4 billion pounds on revenues of 4.4 million.
Either there is something wrong with those numbers, or the happy days of the internet boom are back!
The ______ Agenda
I know C&W controls a lot of connectivity throughout the US so this could be huge for a lot of corporations. It says they will honor their SLAs until they decide upon further action, but how well will they uphold the SLA? And more importantly does this come with a huge reduction in staff, as I would assume it will, and how can they uphold SLAs that are already being strained. Hopefully this will not result in any major down times. The beauty of the internet is its ability to adjust routes and optimize connections but loosing a big backbone provider could result is some serious revenue loss for some businesses.
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
As competition continues to slim down, I am afraid that it is greatly going to increase the baseline costs of these large internet companies. Of course, this will eventually make its way down to us.
Competition is good. Although I would hate for the government to regulate the internet, grants and loans for improvement of its foundation
would help keep the current system strong and affordable.
Davak
What's next rap? Heavy metal? Opera . . . well, it was never that popular.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Here's one...
C&W does a wide range of things in the US, including operating colocation facilities, providing connectivity to businesses, operating dialup POPs, and running a major backbone. As a whole, these operations are losing $1 million a day (according to the article), but is it possible that one or two of them might actually be profitable? Will C&W completely pull out of the US, or will they keep a much more limited presense?
:-)
Another thing: will some operations be sold to other companies (and their customers transferred without loss of service), or will everything be turned off and each piece of equipment sold to the highest bidder?
I doubt anyone has the answers, but these are my questions.
Do I remember that Slashdot is/was hosted by Exodus? I'm too lazy to investigate.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
C&W tried to charge as much for a conection as they did in euroupe. who wants to pay 75 grand a month for a t-3 when everyone else is charegeing 3 to 8 grand. they tried to justify the costs to a prospective customer by claiming we have mci's back bone. when asked if they have upgraded it they say no. They are loosing money for one simple reason... POOR MANAGEMENT AND BULLHEADEDNESS
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
According to Netcraft, slashdot.org itself is using IPs owned by C&W.
Between the porn sites, open relays and unresponsiveness re spam/TOS, I'm not surprised these folks are getting out of the business. Hopefully whoever buys the pieces knows what to do with them.
I can't wait for the day that I can lose almost $10 billion (that's 9 frickin zero's) two years in a row, and still be capable of 'restructuring'.
On a similar note, a Trivial Pursuit question the other night said that some crown prince of Brunei spent $16 billion in one year. Had to get a gold plated toilet brush, among other things.
Which is a better waste of money? Just curious.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
Nothing to see here. Just move along. Ignore the smell of burning monkeys. Flood? What flood? Keep moving, you looky-loos.
They are competing against a big company that is already bankrupt and in protection in court.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Isn't Mae-East located in one of the C&W buildings in the Tysons Corner, Viriginia, USA area? I thought that was where the NSA had installed all of their Echelon sniffers. I bet there is some real back room skullduggery going on if this is true.....
And news reports show that media deregulation is nothing to be feared.
"And we need to concentrate on those markets that are sustainable ... "
Sustainable here means that you're collecting enough revenue (cash is good) to pay for all the inventory you're building. The first sign of trouble is a cashflow shortage.
Unmanaged growth is a temptation that's caught so many telecoms. Maybe they were thinking of achieving economies of scale or putting too much weight in the "grow or die" paradigm. Or maybe their CEO's were making pride-based decisions.
It's human to be overly optimistic about a venture that you're starting. Business plans quite often anticipate large profits in the future to pay for current excess spending and growth.
There's a Burmese saying "Big tiger, big paws", the analogy being that a large entity needs a lot to keep it upright - has big expenses and maintenance needs. This is even more significant when it's growing.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Sorry, someone had to say it.
Looks as if this brings us one step closer to a few companies controlling the entire internet space. Just like public utilities. Next thing you know, there will be more gov't control and regulation on the 'net slashdot will be a felony.
What? Did anyone else read that too? Then I hear they're throwing in the towel. That's not balls out. Lightweights.
Is that Exodus and other hosting centers are having trouble because they're players in a shrinking middle market for the business of hosters that are:
The price/capability ratio of dedicated hosts (probably Linux/BSD on x86 hardware with really fat pipes) is falling. The difference in total cost between hosting something at Exodus and just building a good server room somewhere on a corporate campus or two is falling. (Initial build-out is expensive, but property is a pretty safe place to sink money these days, plus you can expense it and keep expensing the depreciation.)
I'm not saying there's nobody that needs Exodus-type services, but it's mostly folks that don't fit into one of these other (growing) categories.
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
-------
The webhosting/colo businesses - C&W bought Digital Island and then Exodus Communications. Exodus at that time was market leader in colo, hosting a lot of very large operations such as Yahoo. But EXDS and Digital Island had each spent a fortune on equipping their data centres, and had committed to heavy exposure on building leases. This lease problem is the biggest headache for C&W - some estimates talk of a cost of $700 million to terminate. This is compounded by a haemorrhaging of customers.
...
As someone else has pointed out, the only likely way C&W could "sell" their US operation is to pay someone to take it off their hands. Given the scale of the Exodus lease problems, C&W would probably have to pay several hundred $M. Those massive colo sites have little alternative use - they are not like office blocks that can find new tenants. Many of them were taken in ultra-expensive sites like Santa Clara at the height of the dotcom/property bubble.
---------
At least that would be one case where people aren't crying 'save the children'!
Oh my god, no more ROOT BEER!!!!!!
Check out their corporate site cw.net.
The footer at the bottom says:
© Cable & Wireless, 2003
Updated January 1, 1970 GMT
IE Webmaster: webmaster@cw.net
Talk about staying on top of things...
The article in todays' WSJ (sorry, no link,
I read the dead-tree version) cited the
basic problem in the telco industry as being
overcapacity, but then goes on to quote
the C&W prez as saying that they're going
to try to resell excess capacity to make
up losses.
The're also going to try to "hang on to
existing revenue streams" while exiting
the US Market (so, exactly what valuable
assets are you selling, and who, exactly
is buying ?)
Also says that the blulk of their revenue
comes from web hosting...there's a winning
1998 market (I just left a large recently
renamed telco doing securtiy for web hosting).
It's corporate "leadership" without a clue.
---eludom
Good riddance. Clueless and Witless has been one of the worst spam supporters that ever been.
I once worked for a company that used Digital Island (and then Exodus) for a lot of our media streaming needs. You could see the breakdown several months before C&W came in. Even after terminating our account (we owed them several hundred thousand through no fault of our own) and weeks of nasty phone calls, we were still able to walk into the data center where we were co-located and pick up about 10K worth of hardware.
They even had boxed it all up nicely for us. You'd think they would want to hold onto this for a bit. By the looks of the center, they certainly weren't hurting for free rack space.
I still get messages about maintenance and routes going down, almost daily. *sigh*
As a current C&W employee..
I have to say there really isn't any suprise to this. While its hard for any business to make a profit off of low-margin web-hosting, C&W was an ill-suited company to try and do so.
During the past ~2 years since it acquired both Digital Island and Exodus, C&W business model has been to lay-off people who knew what they were doing, and promote those who didn't (usually to the VP level).
The whole business is run by a very top-heavy management structure who have no interest whatsoever in doing what is good for the company. Instead upper management have only been concerned with building their own empires, even if duplicate functions existed elsewhere in the company.
There is only so long a company can exist with such an attitude, and C&W has hit the end of the road.
Google has something like 10 US mirror/datacenters. www-cw is one, but there's also www-va, www-sj, www-fi, etc. Sometimes you can get different results from them.
My spam traffic will probably drop in half with those bozos off the internet. Good riddance!
Michael
Do you have ESP?
I used to work for them three years ago...needless to say it was already a sinking ship then and I'm glad I got out when I did.
How frickin' hard is it to make money in their line of business? You're providing something that almost every business and individual in the western hemisphere wants ... how can you blow that kind of opportunity?
I suspect this has more to do with shitty management and "expand at any cost" business practices than a failure of the actual market.
...along with every other company remotely connected to the computer/communications/media industry.
When I worked at the University of California (up till July 2001) C&W supplied the bandwidth for the entire UC system, except for Internet2. I wonder what kind of scrambling happened between then and now, as it appears that the UC System is now on Qwest.
Yet another reason that it should have been Bernie Ebbers and John "The Internet Doubles Every 90 Days" Sidgemore in handcuffs yesterday, not Martha Stewart.
...when all of your data centers are unoccupied by paying customers.
...
I used to work for a customer of Exodus/Cable Wireless, and saw the exodus from Exodus. I remember the boom years when I only went in on Sunday because that was the only day I could get a parking spot and not have to park across the street. I remember when you could see Dell and Compaq and Gateway and Sun systems in every cage, wall to wall. When you could sit in your cage and have conversations with two or three other customers and learn some really neat stuff. Where the soda and chips were only 25 cents. Where security walked you to your cage and unlocked it for you.
The last few years saw the datacenter become a ghost town. Granted, it was a 62 degree ghost town, but still a ghost town. Where every cage around ours became empty, and we even went from a full cage to a half cage thanks to faster and smaller equipment. The parking lots are never full, soda and chips are now priced the same as everywhere, and no one to talk with. And now security gives you the key to your cage and you walk past rows of empty plastic-coated wire mesh cages.
How do you lose money?? Because you have to run a gazillion foot data center, with all of it's associated infrastructure needs, and you don't have any customers in it. Compare it to the cost of running an apartment building if it is only half occupied. There are still maintenance costs, but now you only have half the tenants to cover it. You still have to heat and cool the empty apartments, although not the same as the rest, and you have no one to pay for it.
Don't get me wrong though. I loved the facility. It was clean and well maintained. I could get away from the home office and work without being interrupted. I didn't have to worry about AC and power and network outside of our cage. If C&W was still a viable company, there would be no hesitation about using them for a data center.
But the 90's are over
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I worked at CWUSA from 94 to 2001 and I have been predicting their demise for years now. Around 96 the executives were complaining that they were only making 3 cents of profit for every 6 cent call. Having had experience in a mature sector(retail) I recognized immediately that they were spoiled by huge margins. I knew that once the telecom industry became saturated and they actually had real competition that they would either adapt or change. Management did change but instead of concentrating on their core business, telecom services and custom billing for small businesses(which brought them to the Billion in rvenue mark), they decided to buy MCI's crappy internet backbone and become an internet company. Nevermind that they had no experience in this market and the executives didn't know what they were buying. Internet was sexy and they could market that much easier than boring old long distance. Their long distance service was an incredible cash cow.
New offerings were brought up and provisioning and billing systems were rushing into place(sometimes). Often a new product would have to be provisioned manually and there was no way to tell if a customer wasn't paying their bill for well over a year after they first started selling the product.
Then to top it all off the mothership(PLC) decided they were going to become a global organization and they ended up picking up the biggest inept blowhards in CWUSA to help create the global organization. While all this was going on they were still having their yearly layoffs, which they did even when they were making a billion a year. Management would lay off the workers and keep the management around. It was not uncommon to know of managers and directors with no people.
Not long after I left they decided to lay off all the techincal people and outsource the work to IBM. Many people were gone for good and many were tranferred to IBM. But the funniest thing about this grand plan was the first task of the plan-- assign a senior management team to organize the layoffs(to them management teams were the "magic pixie dust"). Those people were so management happy that they have a few building in Vienna Virginia stocked with managers, senior managers, director and AVPs that are quite adept at bullshitting, creating powerpoint documents and dodging bullets but they can't manage a damn thing. I could write for hours about the shenanigans that went on in that place but I'll just end with something an old relative who has been a businessman since WWII told me. "Anyone can make money when times are good, it's when times are tough that you find out who the real businessmen are." They were poseurs and it was only a matter of time before their hubris coupled with reality bite them in the ass. The sad thing is these same losers will end up getting nice cushy management positions at Verizon, Worldcom or AT&T and probably for more money.
OmniCorp.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Not sure how the situation is in the U.S., but Exodus Tokyo is, well, pretty freakin' empty. C&W bought them, for a quite cheap price actually, and decided to use Exodus as a "premium service" since C&W already had some nice datacenters near by. However, the costs were STILL prohibitive, and as far as I could tell (by walking around the floors I had access to pre/post Chapter 11, up to a few months ago) there are rows of cage space after cage space that never have, and still have, no occupants. It's really weird to see this "Matrix Ammunition Depot" looking baren area, with an EMC monster sitting alone in a single cage.
I checked the power supply/regulator and the load was around 5%, so they basically have massive redundant equipment along with airconditioning (which chilled the hell out my ass May last year when I was stuck there for a few days, thank you very much) that eats up a lot of power for no particular reason other than to cool off a bunch of nothing (+ my hot ass). I'm sure that's just a small part of the "un-necessary" running costs involved.
Add that to the fact that they (relatively) recently sold off Global Online (the ISP division that was originally acquired as a "foot in the door" when Exodus originally landed in Japan) which was actually profittable, and things start to fall into perspective. I wouldn't be amazed at all if C&W bails out of Exodus Tokyo soon too. (As if there haven't been rumors about this for quite some time.)
Is that anything like ConHugeCo?
And if you get the reference, Cap'n Hector says, "Pay your shareware fee!"
It's very simple: there are no customers.
I've walked around a bunch of the old Exodus datacenters in New York City: even the "older" ones (ie the former GlobalCenter colo on 8th avenue, and the original NJ1 at Exchange Place)) were like ghost towns: row after row after row of empty racks.
The colocation "boom" of the 1990s was a pyramid scheme: VC-financed colo companies selling space at completely fictional rates to VC-financed startups. As soon as the venture money dried up, the small customer vanished...and then the big customers vanished...and then the behemoths themselves began to die off.
No matter how much you cut your costs, you can't make a profit if you have no customers.
My completely off-the-cuff guess is that even if C&W mothballed 90% of their colo facilities in the US, and all of their competitors (UUNet, AT&T, Globix, Level3) did likewise, there would still not be enough customers to keep them afloat. Colo is expensive, and there just aren't that many companies who actually need six-sigma uptimes. (Not that any of the colo providers ever came anywhere near their promised reliability numbers in practice, but that's a whole different rant.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
The signs were theee in the fall of last year. I wrote about it, and why hosting businesses tend to fall part, earlier this year.
. ht m
http://www.practical-tech.com/network/n04172003
Long story short, stupid business plans and lousy management equals failure. C&W's US business had both in spades. The real question, from where I sit, is will C&W continue to survive in the UK? That was unthinkable only a few years ago, but they've made so many bad moves recently and bleed out so much capital you really have to wonder.
Steven
They used to be at DigitalNation, now known as NTT/Verio... Time to move again?
grisha.org
For those of you who are at C&W, or have already left and looking for places to work, I'd suggest looking at the IT market in Hawaii. There is plenty of contract work with the military there and you can't be the great weather that they have. :-) If you have clearance, that's even better and they are ALWAYS looking for people with awesome skills. If you work in a data center, I'm sure NMCI (Navy Marine Corps Intranet) will be looking for good people... just a thought though. Hope this helps!
just MAYBE all this US infrastructure in the broadband area would become profitable if they would PLEASE just spend some more and FINISH the LAST MILE everywhere. There's a huge untapped market out there for broadband. And dig this! I just found out about an area around here that has NO internet being provided except for satellite, there's NO dialup even, let alone broadband. Knocked me socks off. Yes, small community, but hundreds of homes total. they got some dinky coop phone deal, but zero internet! akkk!and every place outside their little area is long distance. This is just rude. I was also visiting in a neighboring state, now this area is normal built up, thousands of people, real cities, etc, this pretty big area JUST last month got offered broadband from some provider, it's bottom of the barrel adsl service, 120$ for 40 hours a month!!!!!!!! I was talking to a big real estate guy there, he was relieved to just get it.
Those are some-not all but certainly some- of the reasons they say we have a "glut" of big pipes/infrastructure and they aren't profitable, there's tens of thousands of square miles (or more, but it's in every state of the nation) and millions and millions of people all over who couldn't purchase the product even if they wanted to. The last mile ain't there. Seems lame as all get out to put all this other expensive stuff in, then not do the last %^^&%&^ mile. I am just amazed it continues, this is 2003, not 1995. I mean, once it's in, doesn't fiber or good cooper or coax cable last like decades or more? Or are all these companies just worried about this years profits, not seeing the really big picture here. Suppose they had done that with POTS, just skipped the last mile? Of course it would have never worked. This is the US, not some third world place, there's little reason to not have this stuff built, if they could get rid of some of the more stoopid local monopoly laws, and if INVESTORS were truly INVESTING for the long haul, and not acting like a big group of pure gambling something for nothing day traders.
1-877-4LEVEL3. They'll gobble 'em up with all that Warren Buffet money. Soon, when there's a Level3 story, you can wrap a little Borg-icon like /. has on Gates.
my former employer had their site hosted by Digital Island down on Staten Island, NY. Having moved from Exodus in Jersey City, I have to admit it was a very nice layout, they were very professional... we loved working with them.
Unfortunately, it sounds like C&W has killed all that. Yet again, a large company snaps up some smaller fish and runs them into the ground. Hope all the guys from DI are doing well... you were great!
Our pipe goes through CW in Toronto, I wonder if this is included? (Looks like my route to slashdot is also on cw)
Traceroute to slashdot.org....
1,2 removed
3. iar2-so-2-2-0.Toronto.cw.net
4. bcr2-so-2-2-0.Toronto.cw.net
5. dcr1-so-4-2-0.Chicago.cw.net
6. dcr2-loopback.SantaClara.cw.net
7. bhr1-pos-0-0.SantaClarasc8.cw.net
8. csr1-ve240.SantaClarasc8.cw.net
9. 66.35.212.174
That wasn't our experience, they just hit the switch on our LD...
Their move to primus left us without inbound 800 service, and the people at Primus were less than helpful/clueful -- CNW totally dropped the ball,a nd Primus could not even find it to pick it up.
We've been a CNW ISP client since last year, not migrated to newedge, and our rep is still pitching bandwidth as CNW today
Bizarre to say the least
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
We got this letter from our account rep at C&W this morning.
---
I'd like to take this opportunity to summarize Cable & Wireless' =
announcements today. I look forward to discussing this with you in more =
detail and please either call, or let me know a good time to reach you. =
The recent speculation in the media may have been unnerving to you and =
other customers, and we're excited to deliver our message today. I want =
to assure you that our business is not going away, and there is no need =
to seek an alternative provider for your services.
The bottom line is that C&W PLC intends to withdraw from the US market. =
CWUSA is a composite of three primary, and incredibly valuable assets =
including Exodus, Digital Island, and the former MCI Internet Backbone. =
CWUSA has made excellent progress against our November 13 =
re-organization announcement, however, the internet centric business of =
CWUSA does not fit with CW PLC's new strategic focus on national telecom =
companies with strong positions in their primary markets.
C&W PLC will continue to fully fund and support CWUSA until a buyer or =
investor is found for the business. There are no new changes to US =
headcount, or data center facilities, aside from reductions that were =
outlined in our November 13 re-structure announcement. We, as well as =
you (I'm sure) hope for this to be a swift transaction.
Frankly, for myself, and my US colleagues, this presents an =
extraordinary opportunity to grow a new brand on our strengths of the =
combined legacy industry leaders, and continue to provide you, and all =
our customers with exceptional service, and a range of product offerings =
that is unparalleled in our business.
---
Clueless & Witless is giving up? Woo-hoo! Ding dong, the witch is dead!
From the Infoworld story:
C&W has been on the retreat in the U.S. since September 2002...
Maybe longer than that. It so happens that C&W was my first ISP, known as CWIX. About four years ago, though, they decided to get out of the ISP business and my account got sold to Prodigy. CWIX was a decent ISP, whereas Prodigy blew. The strong may survive, but it doesn't mean they provide better service.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
Here's all the blocks from C&W i've gotten spam from. I've tried larting them with little success so i said fuck it and started plonking their net blocks into my firewall.
# C & W spamming lamers
iptables -A spam -s 204.71.191.0/24 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 66.35.193.0/24 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 216.109.64.0/19 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 64.28.64.0/19 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 64.253.192.0/20 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 216.19.160.0/20 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 216.144.64.0/20 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 216.64.192.0/19 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 64.70.18.0/24 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 216.74.128.0/18 -j DROP
iptables -A spam -s 64.37.192.0/18 -j DROP
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I clicked on the "Whats New" on cw.net and then did a double take when I saw "New Jobs are Available".
Then I noticed that the last time they updated that section was June 11 2000.
The started bailing out a while ago. I got 22 days notice that they were turning my pipes off like 3 months ago. 22 days is about impossible to get a new pipe installed and running. Bigger problem was that Cable and Wireless didn't even give me the 22 days, they gave me 17 days before taking my pipe down. Thankfully the good people at Time Warner Telecom took care of me and got my lines up early and I was only down for like 4 hours. Needless to say we have lawsuits pending against cable and wireless for breach of contract.
If your not cheating your not trying. If your not trying your not winning and if your not winning why play?
"The beauty of the internet is its ability to adjust routes and optimize connections..."
Problem is that the internet isn't as resilient as people assume. Yes I'm aware of what the "intent" was, but the reality for various reasons is different. Take out key points and 80% to 90% of the internet could be impaired from both direct cause, and cascade effects.
I am of the understanding that people have the opinion they suck.
In holland C&W used to own widexs hosting. They sold it to ion-ip hosting company. ion-ip is running most / or all of c & w hosting services.
And what the hell is with that colossal font size=4 stuff in the sans-serif font in the article titles? Looks like ass, guys.
I have several friends who work there (well, more accurately some that still do but most have been canned in the past 18 months). It's been known that they were shutting things down in the US the screwing up the ass *without lube* all of the US companies that they bought (digital island? exodus? hello!)
Lousy service, crappy connectivity...they were my host's facilities (they wisely moved) and they were constantly having problems. If they are one of the leaders, I really haven't got much hope for the sector.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I work for a small ISP, and actually around December C&W sent us a letter that basically said:
"btw, we're pulling out of X% of our US markets. Your pipes will be shut off in 30 days. Yes we know that we've got a 7 year contract agreement, but well, too bad. have a nice day".
This resulted in legal action on our part and a lot of frantic searching for other providers. It all shook out ok in the end, but it there was a lot of sleepless nights for some time.
I just got an email from my account manager at C&W here in the US. He says C&W USA is not pulling out, so probably wont effect too many people. At least my T1 won't be going anywhere :)
"Our parent company is exiting the US...C&W PLC. Cable & Wireless America
(CWA) is still here and operating."
The United States of America. Elections are suspended do to terrorists. Have a nice day.
SIG: HUP
I think this "breaking news" on slashdot is a sham, the only advantage is you get to put in your own two cents first.
/. effect). Discussion on the post can't start until the story is available to all (unless I'm missing something).
It's more so that you get to check out the articles/sites in the post before most others (read: you aren't affected by the
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
... and weeks of nasty phone calls, we were still able to walk into the data center where we were co-located and pick up about 10K worth of hardware.
Legally, they were required to let you come in there and remove your equipment. They cannot hold your equipment without authorization (criminal) because of a billing dispute (civil). A former client of mine was threatened in this manner once, and he simply said he would be down at the data center with the sheriffs deputies within a few hours. When he got there, the employes were more cordial than usual about letting him in there to get his stuff.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Ahhh, another company damaged by Ellen Hancock.
and now,
So, what other companies and organizations are on the watch-list?
Disclaimer: Well, duh ... of course I am a disgruntled ex-employee of Ms. Hancock back when she was a IBMer. I just did not realize how bad she really was ... even if none of this was her fault, she has still been at the epicenter of many closed office buildings over the years.
They saved alot of former Exodus customers a couple years back, then Global Crossing customers (like me) found salvation. Even though they've been through financial difficulties of their own over the last year and a bit, I haven't heard a single story of any UUnet/WCom/MCI customers seeing a degradation in service because of it. They seem like a logical alternative if C&W customers start running....
The problem with this idea is that there is no significant barrier to entry in the low-end colo or hosting market, other than running fiber to a facility. As soon as the rates for hosting go up, a lot of people will look for cheaper ones, and you'll see another crop of low-end companies start up.
Don't forget that even that barrier is significantly reduced by the fact that the capacity is always there on most of that dark fiber, so they have an incentive to sell it, as long as they haven't pulled it out of the ground and turned off the power to it. Not to mention that Verio and other former players in the big data center market will still be looking to get out from under some of the leases for their closed facilities, for at least the next couple of years. Even if they default on their leases, the building owners will be much happier leasing you the facility as is instead of having to rip out all the heavy infrastructure modding.
Hosting's going to be a commodity market for a long time, if not from now on, I think.
Get off my launchpad!
DIE!!! DIE!!! DIE!!!p ot.net
bettersex.com
customoffers.com
offersde
All opt-out spammers hosted by C&W.
Then too, it could be because I subscribed all their contact info to the opt-out spammers that they are hosting...
I was once a residential cable internet customer of a company called Smyrna Cable. While I was their customer, they were bought out by Charter Communications. My last few bills had the Charter logo on them. However, my personal web page and email address remained under the smyrnacable.net domain. I cancelled my account when I moved out of their service area almost a year ago.
I've been checking my old email address periodically just in case someone tries to contact me there. A couple weeks ago I finally tired of this and asked Charter to kindly close my inbox and remove my Web site (for which I've long forgotten the FTP password.) But their tech support department has no information about those servers and denies any association with Smyrna Cable.
I checked WHOIS, and the IP addresses of the Web and mail server are actually registered to Cable & Wireless. But C&W also denies any knowledge of their existance. Strangely, Charter's nameservers are still listed as authoritative for the domain.
It makes me think the entire industry hasn't got a clue. A company grows to a certain size and the proverbial left hand no longer knows what the right is up to.
From a home consumer's point of view; we're hopelessly screwed.
Time to see if I can figure out what the hell I used to do [b]before[/b] the "rise of the internet", I guess.