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

KPN Koninklijke KPN N.V. (Royal KPN N.V. in English), trading as KPN is a Dutch List of telephone operating companies, telecommunications company. KPN originated from a government-run postal, telegraph and telephone service and is based in Rotterda ...

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/I ...

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., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

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 (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Intern ...

, 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 swaps. 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
/ref>

References

{{reflist

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