KPNQwest was a telecommunications company equally owned by the Dutch national telecom operator

KPN KPN (in full Koninklijke KPN N.V., also Royal KPN N.V.) is a Dutch landline and mobile telecommunications company. KPN originated from a government-run postal, telegraph and telephone service and is based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. History Un ...

and

Qwest Qwest Communications International, Inc. was a United States telecommunications carrier. Qwest provided local service in 14 western and midwestern U.S. states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dako ...

Communications International Inc., the Internet communications company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The company was set to bring together the state-of-the-art fibre-optic networks of the two partners and the Internet services expertise and customer base of

EUnet EUnet was a very loose collaboration of individual European UNIX sites in the 1980s that evolved into the fully commercial entity EUnet International Ltd in 1996. It was sold to Qwest in 1998. EUnet played a decisive role in the adoption of TCP/IP ...

International. The company planned to build and operate a high-capacity European fibre optic, Internet Protocol-based network that was to span 13,000 kilometers when completed 2001. During its history of less than four years, KPNQwest created a unique, nothing-is-impossible working spirit and company culture among its 2,500 employees under the leadership of an

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

veteran Jack McMaster. The company collapsed in a spectacular bankruptcy in 2002. The bankruptcy was largely due to the general

Dot-com boom The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...

, which created highly inflated capacity demands for telecom operators. Facing this situation, many operators started to make large network capacity deals with each other, called

hollow swap Hollow may refer to: Natural phenomena *Hollow, a low, wooded area, such as a copse * Hollow (landform), a small vee-shaped, riverine type of valley *Tree hollow, a void in a branch or trunk, which may provide habitat for animals Places * Sleepy ...

s. These swaps created artificial revenue figures and thus provided incorrect financial guidance to the company management and investors. In year 2000 it was estimated that KPNQwest backbone was carrying more than 50% of European IP traffic. As of 2018, KPNQwest Italia is still in business: a subsidiary of KPNQwest NV in 2000, it became autonomous in 2003 (ex COMM2000).KPNQwest Italia
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References

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External links

US House Panel Probes TelecomsKPNQwest/Ebone archive from nocpeople.orgReports on legal formalities in the bankruptcy
Companies disestablished in 2002 Lumen Technologies KPN Internet service providers of the Netherlands 2002 establishments in the Netherlands