Ged Carroll

Looking back at Enron and the net in 2000

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Enron: even now is a byword for dodgy dealing and corruption. Back in the summer of 2000, Enron was a large respectable corporation.  Three people came over from Portland, Oregon to London. They looked to pioneer a new way of thinking about broadband capacity and they came to Europe to do peering agreements and business deals. They were ‘Enron Broadband Services’.

The whole thing was moving at ‘internet speed’, which is a euphemism for crazy fast and with money flittered everywhere.  So I ended up working agency side arranging everything from pre-paid mobile phones to a dinner for 150 internet geeks at The Hempel – a luxury hotel with a minimalist restaurant that used to be in Bayswater.

Enron acquired Portland General Electric (PGE) back in the mid-1990s. This was part of Enron’s play in deregulated electricity markets. With PGE also came an optical fibre network. The company had been dropping fibre into the ground every time it did reinstatements. Enron then built and leased optical fibre from the likes of Level3.

EBSgnrlpresoAug2000 from gamaus

 

While I was trying to get these guys in front of the European telecoms press I was hearing from my media contacts that Level3 were actively briefing against them, saying that their business model was full of shit. They were right it was. Enron Broadband Services depended on their ‘Enron Intelligent Network’ a set of proprietary technologies that was supposed to prioritise traffic for quality of service and commercial traffic reasons.

Like many things at the time the technology was less developed than one would believe. Much of the functionality replicated existing technology such as MPLS. IBM developed their e-commerce offering on the back of ‘suckered’ customers like Boxman.com. Technology was a sketchy business at the time; but it seemed to matter less as the world was being changed. This was pre-9/11 and Gap was convincing many people that khakis were cool.

https://youtu.be/OLSjcGjLQ7s

In the case of IBM, they seem to be still doing similar practices two decades later; this time with their Watson machine learning offering.

The problem was that the ‘Enron Intelligent Network‘ was a relatively minor sin compared to everything else that was going on in the corporation.

What happened to the companies mentioned in the Enron slides?