In 2011, CIX seemed to have no future. Leslie reveals that an emotional connection as much as a business opportunity led him to buy it.
In 2011, CIX seemed to have no future. Leslie reveals that an emotional connection as much as a business opportunity led him to buy it
Iwas a relatively latecomer to CIX. This was back in the 1990s – and in my defence, I was only 14. My discovery of the internet went from CompuServe to AOL and then to the famed Compulink Information eXchange, as it was once known. Introduced to CIX by a Catholic priest at my school, I soon began discussions with anyone and everyone on its conferencing system. I had ideas above my station, as you do when you’re young; not only do you think you know everything, you want to tell everyone too.
Little did I know that it was the place to be at that time. It was very much akin to a night club that, once you went to it, made the other popular ones you used to go to seem a little touristy. It had its faults, niggles and weird features, but what decent club doesn’t? After I left school in 1999, I ended up working there for two years. I considered it, in a fun way, as my national service: helping people to diagnose dial-up networking issues on Windows, and taking the flack when the mail server broke at least once a day.
In 2001, I started ICUK with my business partner. We did it by lobbing together other people’s services under our brand. We were a virtual host, virtual reseller, virtual ISP – and virtual everything. But we worked hard, and it worked, and people were happy. We moved from virtual to physical. The business grew and experienced all the associated problems: finding new staff, migrating customers onto your own servers, your own pipes with BT, and spending a fortune with Cisco – a sum that was equivalent to what you’d pay for a deposit on a London apartment.
But I owe a lot to CIX. It was my first proper job. It taught me what MX records were with mail servers. One of the guys there taught me scripting and VBScript, and how NT IIS Shared Hosting works. I learnt company structures, and experienced people’s pain as both a customer and a member of staff. Much of that went into building ICUK and, in some ways, I felt I didn’t want to repeat the mistakes I’d witnessed with CIX’s own growth in the late 1990s.
While ICUK was growing, I watched on as CIX went through its decline. After numerous buy-outs, repacking and relabelling, I watched as it went back to its roots as a conferencing provider – but with the legacy hosting and email stuff still chomping away at data centre power as if it were going out of fashion. So, one February in 2011, glancing across to my partner in crime, I said “shall we buy CIX?”. “Okay”, he replied, and the initial contact email was sent.
Buying decision
Why did we choose to buy CIX? With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the many other free web forums out there and growing in popularity, why would people still be paying for a closed service that was built on technology from the 1980s? I still can’t answer that – but the emotional connection with CIX was probably the primary reason. To me, it was a piece of history that needed a new home and someone to look after it.
In May 2011, CIX was ours. All the deeds had been signed, and ICUK was now listed as its parent company. It’s an interesting experience buying your first company. Solicitors ask more questions than you can imagine, and, unlike most house purchases, you’re never quite sure if in 20 years’ time it will be worth anything.
We got to work and updated the systems. We compiled CoSy (remember that?) onto Linux. Virtualised all the old Windows 2000 servers running virtual hosting. Updated the official reader, at the time called Ameol2. We brought in a brand-new mail platform. Converted three racks of hardware down to about half a rack. We updated the web front-end, and even released a new reader called CIXReader that doesn’t connect to CoSy – all modcons coming into place.
Meanwhile, ICUK continued to grow, launching Ethernet leased lines, new broadband services and investing heavily in our wholesale arm. In 2017, we made the decision to make CIX its own ISP again. But unlike ICUK, which would concentrate on wholesale, CIX would retail to consumers. We saw it as a good opportunity to breathe new life into CIX, and get the brand out there once again.
Which raises another question: why would anyone want to run a
“I learnt company structures and experienced people’s pain as both customer and a member of staff”
retail-focused ISP in 2018? How on earth could we compete against the likes of BT and TalkTalk – and why would we even want to?
For us, it stems from legacy. When a business starts, you often chase after anything, or anyone, that’s willing to pay you for something. It’s somewhat irresistible when someone asks “can you do my broadband for me,” so you just say yes, and then worry about sorting it out once you’re back in the office.
So ICUK had many “legacy” retail customers, and our resellers didn’t want to compete with us directly – so CIX, the retail ISP, was reborn.
Running an ISP
It’s hard work to run an ISP, both for retail and resellers. You need a good team around you. A team you can trust, and with people who care about the job they’re doing. Finding such folk isn’t easy, but once you have them, keep them. At all costs.
You also need to keep your eye on the ball. It’s so easy to fall behind another provider, or have a sense of “we’re better than them” attitude. Whether or not you’re better isn’t for you to decide: your customers will decide that for you. Having to pick up the flack every day for problems that sometimes aren’t even in your control can go two ways. Your customers may end up thinking you’re just not for them and leave, or they’ll appreciate the honesty and personal touch and reward you with their loyalty.
Then there’s the equipment. Don’t think for one moment that ISPs are loaded. Any decent ISP will be ploughing a good portion of its profits into expanding the network and putting systems in place, so that waking in the middle of the night to fix something becomes a rare occurrence over time.
This is especially difficult for a smaller-than-average ISP trying to break cover. And yes, the odd corner being cut has been done – just to get things working. The important thing is that you uncut it as quickly as you can, so it doesn’t happen again.
And suppliers? That’s where the fun begins. Back in the 1990s, an ISP would have had a few leased lines going into their self-made data centre in the back of their office, with some ISDN lines installed and a local number to ring it. Now, an ISP will have several points of presence (PoPs) in data centres across the UK, with numerous dark fibre links connecting them together. All plugged into the tier 1 carriers – and while you hope they won’t go down, you also hope your backup connections are working well. Then there’s making sure you have enough transit from your providers when Wimbledon is on, or when a breaking news story emerges; “excess bandwidth”, as it’s known in the trade.
The main supplier that all internet service providers deal with is Openreach. Your telephone line, your broadband connection and your local exchange are all supplied by this beast of a company. Yes, we bill you; we manage the connection, the IP address, the bandwidth and all the rest of it. However, it’s Openreach’s core product that we’re supplying – and if you’re in the middle of nowhere and can only get 1Mbit/sec on a good day, when the town down the road is bathing in 80Mbits/sec FTTC, there’s little we can do for you.
Love it or hate it, Openreach is here to stay. Whether in the future it remains part of the BT Group is anybody’s guess, and for discussion in another article.
That aside, I shouldn’t be so gloomy. There are many rewards to be had when running your own ISP – even in 2018, with the government threatening to force us to spy on every key you press and every email you download. Yes, there’s the profit side of it, but there’s also the problemsolving element.
Finding the right solution for someone and getting it in and working can still be fun, as is watching the hard work pay off when a new PoP goes online and all the geekiness that comes with it. Even when you run a business with the aim of making sure the bills are paid, the technical enjoyment should never leave you – even when systems go down and you’re buzzed at 3am to fix it.
It all works out in the end.
“Don’t think for one moment that ISPs are loaded; they’ll be ploughing profits back in to expand the network”