Zetnet

Zetnet is one of the UK's oldest ISPs (see list of UK ISPs by age) and according to a New Scientist article is the brainchild of Ghufar Razaq and Graeme Story. It was founded in Lerwick, on the remote Shetland Isles by Ghufar Razaq, Graeme Storey, Tim Cole and Paul Martin. According to the Shetland Fishing News, a journal of Shetland's Fishing Industries, the company began trading on 13 October 1994.

History

In October 1994, Zetnet began trading as Zetnet Services Limited.

In 1996, Zetnet was thrown into the media spotlight through what nearly became a landmark legal case testing UK copyright laws on the internet.

In March 1999 Zetnet founded online gaming service Netgames UK, the brainchild of Sandy Sandom and Phil O'Malley. It was originally a wholly owned subsidiary, sharing Zetnet technical staff, but was sold in May 2000 and incorporated as Netgames UK Ltd. The company was run successfully until August 2001 when reports of a press release detailing a fall-out between Netgames UK management and its technical staff were seen.

In 1999, Zetnet hosted the CVS tree for the eggdrop project, an IRC bot. The CVS was maintained by staff member Jonathan Miles (Cybah), who also coordinated and committed patch contributions for the Eggdrop Development Team.

In 2001, Zetnet took over Charis Internet Services, a Birmingham-based ISP.

In January 2002 Zetnet bought the customers of troubled ISP Cloud-Nine Communications, which had suffered a DDoS attack. Cloud Nine were based in Basingstoke, run by CEO Emeric Miszti and Operations Director John Parr.

On May 12 2003, Zetnet co-founder and Technical Director, Tim Cole, died. The Zetnet home page was changed during the following week, to say "with great sadness Zetnet announces the death of Tim Cole co-founder director" and also "Tim had been suffering with heart problems for many years. On Sunday evening he had a heart attack from which he did not recover". According to an unconfirmed source, Tim's headstone says simply "internet pioneer" and can be found in the yard of the Dunrossness Kirk, Dunrossness in the south of Shetland.

In February 2005, Zetnet closed its head office in the Shetland Isles. According to the Shetland News, much of Zetnet's operations were run from an office in Manchester at the time.

In May 2007, a press release surfaced on PRWeb which indicated that Zetnet was to be purchased by Solutrea Ltd, a "wireless and digital signage solutions provider". John Hyslop was quoted as Zetnet's Managing Director at the time. The deal was reported to have been worth "£857,000 in cash upon closing". However, the agreement was "subject to approval by the Powerstar International Inc. (TSX.V : PWS), board of directors and the Toronto Ventures Exchange". No further information could be found to confirm that this deal was ever completed.

In July 2008, Zetnet was acquired by Breathe Networks Limited (BNL), according to a news article by ISPreview.co.uk. Zetnet joined other BNL brands such as breathe, macunlimited, Ecosse, Intensive Networks, Bush Internet and Fast4. Although BNL stated an intent to operate Zetnet independently, it subsequently consolidated a number of Zetnet's services into its own platform during the first half of 2009, with some problems.

From its community based Shetland roots, the company attracted a large clientele across the UK, attracted by its community ethos and open management. Whilst not leaving its Lerwick roots, the main servers are now located in the Manchester DataCentre where most of the company's operations are now carried out.

Breathe Migration

Zetnet's reputation took a severe nose dive in July 2009 when Breathe's attempts to change the Zetnet email system resulted in thousands of users being unable to access their email for weeks. This tarnished the company's reputation badly with many established long term customers leaving Zetnet to find a reliable ISP.

Breathe had taken the remarkable decision not to notify any of Zetnet's customers before moving them to their servers, nor had they (Breathe) taken a secure backup of the Zetnet database of e-mail username and password combinations prior to the failed migration process! This resulted in an unprecedented request for customers to complete a form on the Zetnet website detailing their full e-mail address and associated password. Regrettably, even this 'Last ditch' attempt to recover some credibility failed in many cases and there was no way that 'Catch-all' addresses could be recovered by this process.

During the chaos which followed, customers were unable to contact Zetnet by telephone or e-mail to resolve website and e-mail issues. It seems that this loss of service is a regular feature of Breathe acquisitions.

According to his online CV, the person responsible for building "Breathe's new chargeable mail system" was Matthew Ralston, a contract "Technical Consultant & Systems Architect" since 2006. Apparently it is "a large clustered e-mail platform supporting approximately 70,000 customers" and the "platform is Linux based, using Courier IMAP and Exim for e-mail with a MySQL Cluster backend database". However, it's not clear who was responsible for the actual migration work. Although Mr Ralston's CV was accessible until at least the 15th July, on the 24th the cv.php page returned a 404 error and the root page of his web site returned a totally blank page. However entering www.mralston.co.uk into Google and clicking the "cached" hyperlink will still allow you view a Google's cached version of his site and CV.

For the whole of July it proved extremely difficult for any customer to contact Zetnet/Breathe by telephone or e-mail and some could not even use their 'My Account - Secure area' to ask questions. Many wanted to obtain a Migration Authorisation Code to close their account and move to a different ISP. Those that could communicate via this medium still didn't always get a MAC within the legal time-frame of five days and had to resort to intervention by OFCOM - though even this proved ineffectual!

Latterly, questions have been asked as to whether Breathe's decision to move the Zetnet servers outside the EU to Florida, without consultation with users, has infringed EU law. IP address 64.29.145.9 is returned for all Zetnet hosted domains, which resolves under 'Whois' to InternetNamesForBusiness.com, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA.

Legal case

In 1996, Zetnet was caught in the middle of a legal case between two of its local customers, The Shetland Times and The Shetland News, over copyright infringement. The web sites of both customers were hosted by Zetnet.