EBONE

EBONE (standing for European Backbone) was a pan-European Internet backbone. It went online in 1992 and was deactivated in July 2002. Some portions of the Ebone were sold to other companies and continue to operate today.

The Ebone consortium was established at the RIPE meeting in Geneva in September 1991 and the network went online in 1992.

In 1996 the consortium was transformed into the Ebone Association which again established a private limited company Ebone Inc. based in Denmark. In 1998 the Ebone Association sold 75% of the company to Hermes Europe Railtel, and in 1999 the remaining 25% was bought by Global Telesystems Group Inc. (GTS) which had then acquired Hermes Europe Railtel.

The Ebone backbone increased by a factor of 40,000 in speed over nine years from 256 kbit/s to 10 Gbit/s and the traffic roughly followed, see table below:

In year 2000 Ebone provided international transit for around 100 Internet Service Providers based in most of the European countries.

In 2001 GTS re-branded all its data communications products as Ebone and Ebone was one of Europe's leading broadband optical and IP network service providers.

In October 2001, KPNQwest acquired Ebone and the Central Europe businesses of GTS and completed their EuroRings network.

Following the Dot com crash and various investigations, KPNQwest declared bankruptcy. In June 2002, it was announced that the Ebone Network Operations Center would be shut down, and the Ebone would be deactivated.

Employees in the Ebone Network Operations Center and elsewhere attempted to keep the network running for many weeks after the last possible sale of the company fell through, but eventually were told to shut down the network and abandon the building, which they did on July 2, 2002.

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