I discovered the Internet via CIX in
early 1994, dialling up on a 14400 modem and being amazed because we had
accessed a server at NASA and downloaded
some pictures of astronauts. I felt like quite the hacker, even though I
wasn't.
I developed my Internet skills in summer
1994 at a summer placement at National
Power in Swindon, who had a 64kbps Internet leased line to their research and
development department. I didn't really understand the
Sun SPARC workstations I was using, but
got to know well Netscape, telnet,
ftp, gopher, and archie. I remember when
Yahoo was at akebono.stanford.edu,
and when Lycos was a spider at
CMU and when it hit 10,000 pages indexed
and thought that was a lot...!
An Early Music Portal
In late 1994 I started a music web site featuring some of
my favourite artists. There were no similar web sites around and I wanted to bring
together links to the few other bits and pieces available on the web.
I
started taking banner adverts to try and pay for the web space, but had
limited success (banner ads are terrible as a revenue stream, unless you're
Google). I decided to start reselling web space of the company I was hosting
my site with, to help
pay for the music web site, and this took off in a big way. This is where Digiserve, the web hosting business, came from.
The music web site eventually faded away through 1996 as I ran out of time to keep it
up to date. It did get featured in a few places though, and was noted in the
book Plug In
- A Guide To Music On The Net (pictured left), which had a
mini-interview with me at the tender age of 19!
Digiserve - Web Hosting
Digiserve started up in October
1995 as a sideline to the music web site, but by Christmas had eclipsed it.
I was taking orders for web hosting every day, in between trying to go to
lectures, and having to
fax them off to Clever.net in Atlanta for them to set up. Unfortunately I
think they were overwhelmed by the growth in their business, and didn't have the systems in place to cope with
their own exploding demand. The service was appalling, so I thought I
could do better than them.
I couldn't afford to buy a server (at the time a decent
Sun server was about the same price as my yearly budget as a student), and I
couldn't find anyone in the UK to host a server at a reasonable rate, but
eventually I found a company in Maryland in the US offering to rent high-specification and
reliable Sun servers. Why Sun? At the time, Linux was too new to be stable
enough as a server operating system. Having my own
server meant I could control everything myself.
My first server cost me $400 a month to rent, a huge
amount for a poor student. I funded the jump in costs using my student loan from the government -
something which I think has given a good return on the investment!
The business carried on growing fast, I scraped through Cambridge with a
degree, and carried on running the business full-time after university. I added servers
hosted in London, San Francisco and Singapore, and moved to an office near
home in mid-1998, working mainly with contractors to keep the overheads
flexible.
In 2000, I joined Onyx Internet, who at the time were
owned by Pacific Gateway Exchange, a NASDAQ-listed telecoms company with
big plans for the future.
Onyx Internet - UK Business ISP
Little did I know that Pacific Gateway, Onyx's parent
company, was very soon to be a trailblazer, but
in a bad way. They had borrowed heavily to expand into the Internet business, and
unknown to everyone in the UK, had secured one of their loans from Bank of
America for many millions of dollars on the Onyx Internet business in the UK. When PGE were unable to raise additional short-term funding, BoA called
in the loan, PGE were unable to pay. So less than six months after I joined, Onyx Internet was placed into
Administrative Receivership by Bank of America.
PGE then very quickly went Chapter 11 and disappeared off the face of the
planet. They were one of the first telecoms bankrupcies, to be followed by many others
far bigger such as MCI Worldcom and Global Crossing.
The management of Onyx decided that the
business was viable and did a management and employee buyout, purchasing
Onyx from the Receivers. More than half the staff in the company invested in
the buyout. After the buyout I became Technical Director, which encompassed
management of the Engineering, Customer Services, Provisioning and MIS departments.
Onyx went through some tough times in the early 2000's, the
dark days when nobody would invest in anything with '.com' in the name,
because of the dot-com bust. We worked hard to make the business profitable,
and Onyx has grown strongly since the MEBO,
and now has a national network stretching from Aberdeen to London, owns a
datacentre in Newcastle, is a
member of LINX and five other peering points, and peers with over 200 other
UK and International ISPs.
I left Onyx in Spring 2005, with the business stabilised and
growing, and it has continued to be a success since.
Manx Telecom
I spent a few months before travelling, working on the
beautiful Isle of Man, with Manx
Telecom as a consultant to their internet business, providing strategic
and operational advice to help them grow this side of the business. I
then took an 18 month career break to travel.
Nominet UK
Whilst at Onyx, I also spent two years on the
Nominet UK
Policy
Advisory Board, Nominet UK being the authority that looks after all
the .uk domain names, and the Policy Advisory Board being the board that
advises on policy for Nominet on behalf of all its stakeholders
(registrants, ISPs, the Internet community etc). This is different from
the Council of Management who make operational decisions based on the
policies set out by the PAB.
Callserve
Communications Ltd
My most recent role has been as COO/CTO at Callserve
Communications Ltd, a leading Voice over IP provider based in Canary
Wharf.
Callserve offer VoIP services to customers in the
Middle East, Africa and Latin America through a network of distributors
and resellers. At Callserve I worked with the technical team to improve
service resiliency and reliability, enhance monitoring and reporting
tools, and worked with the other two members of the executive management
team to successfully sell the business to AIM-listed
Vyke Communications plc in
2008.
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