AboveNet
 | This article contains promotional content. |
| File:AboveNet logo.jpg | |
| Company type | Public (NYSE: ABVT) |
|---|---|
| Industry | telecommunications |
| Founded | mid-1990s |
| Headquarters | White Plains, NY, USA |
Key people | Bill LaPerch, CEO |
Number of employees | 500 (as of 2008) |
| Website | http://www.above.net/ |
AboveNet, Inc. (NYSE: ABVT), builds private optical networks using its fiber assets within 15 metro markets across the United States and in London, UK. Its services include high-bandwidth, from 100Mbps, 1Gbps to 10Gbps metro Ethernet solutions, IP (transit and dedicated), fiber and end-to-end, lit optical services including WDM.
History
AboveNet was formed in the mid-1990s as a colocation provider in San Jose, California. The company expanded rapidly with an IPO in 1998, originally using the ticker symbol ABOV.[1]
In 1999 the company was purchased by Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN), a White Plains, New York-based provider of high bandwidth network connectivity solutions. MFN traces its history back to 1993 creating one of the earliest all-fiber metro area networks in the New York area - to serve the financial services industry and eventually expanded across many cities in the US.
Later the combined company dropped the AboveNet name, and changed its ticker symbol to MFNX, and was a member of the NASDAQ-100 index.
As a result of the collapse of the dot-com bubble, MFN - like many other similar companies, entered a severe liquidity crisis. The company filed for Chapter 11 in May 2002.
As part of the Chapter 11 process the company sold off non-core assets, including its data centers, in the US and mainland Europe, retaining a smaller but more viable footprint.
The Present
The smaller, reorganized company changed its name to AboveNet when emerging from bankruptcy in September 2003, and now trades on the New York Stock Exchange as ABVT.
It has extensive metro fiber networks in London, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. It connects more than 1,800 optically enabled buildings, with more than 2 million fiber miles.
Problems with policy
The company have a very strange policy. Sometimes they block routing of IPs (even not hosted in their network) based on some complains by China or Iran governments or bogus copyright infringement notices from anonymous complainers.
In their early days they even namaged to block Macromedia's site IPs.
In March 2008, for example they blocked http://routingfreak.wordpress.com IPs.
Earlier they blocked http://www.dotcomeon.com/ (Reed more at http://www.dotcomeon.com/abovenet_blackhole.html ) IPs.
The latest case was in 2010 when two Russian blog sites (http://www.flibusta.net and http://lib.rus.ec) hosted in Holland were blocked based on some anonymous complain by some self proclaimed "Internet Rights" company from Russia. Resulting in unavailability of those sites to US and Canada based members of Russian community.
And there more less known incidents like that.
All the blocks were performed without court order or other legal reasons just based on some dubious e-mails they get. And most of the IPs blocked were located outside of US basically preventing US internet users from accessing this sites due the fact that a lot of traffic to and out of US/Canada routed through Above.Net lines.
MAN Services
[1]Metro Area Network Solutions
• Ethernet, Services
• Wave WDM Services
• Fiber Services
WAN Services Wide area network Solutions • IP, Services • VPN Services • [2]eXpressWave Long Haul services