A Brief History of Net2Atlanta

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Net2Atlanta was founded in 1997 as a spin-off of an Atlanta based network integration and on-site service company.  At first, we provided dial-up and e-mail gateway services transferring Internet mail to MS Mail & Groupwise Async Gateways.  The Internet was new to companies then, and many didn't want their employees directly connected.  Instead, companies would have a single shared computer in a public area that was shared.  This attitude mirrored that of 100 years ago when telephones were new and the boss was afraid they'd be abused.

In 1999, Net2Atlanta became one of the first Georgia ISPs to offer the new ADSL.  Naturally, many of our customers converted from the more expensive and slower ISDN lines to the new DSL.  DSL in those days was straight ATM without PPPOE, which allowed us to bond up to 4 channels together for a net speed of 6M down and up to 2M up.  Alas, Bellsouth killed the old ATM network in 2007.  We also began selling T1 services.

We bought our building near the Big Chicken in 2001.  This became our NOC and our first data center.  We began offering server colocation and building a fault tolerant, extremely reliable network.

In 2002, spam reached universally intolerable levels.  Our reaction was to offer a new anti-spam service which we branded "SpamDragon".  By 2009, the SpamDragon has grown to protect thousands of mailboxes and over 100 domains.  Also in 2002, our T1 offering began to expand as some businesses outgrew DSL.  We began bonding T1s together with each other and with DSL to provide more speed and redundancy.  We still can provide bonded T1 and DSL, which allows 3M down & 1.5 up as well as auto failover in the event one fails.  The T1 comes back to Marietta, while the DSL goes to downtown Atlanta providing site and path diversity.

We added Metro-e and Fast Fiber Internet to our repertoire in 2006.  Through a mix of leased dark and lit fibers from AGL, Zayo & AT&T, we began to provide 10M through 1Gb service to Atlanta businesses.  Now, Fast Fiber is a big part of our portfolio of services.  Also in 2006, we were contracted to manage a data center on Lawrenceville Highway.

We merged with Great Access in 2008, which increased our presence in the TelX facility at 56 Marietta Street.  Our bandwidth and connectivity increased significantly.  We acquired the lease on a number of racks at 56 Marietta allowing us to offer even higher bandwidth colocation services.  Our connectivity improved greatly by our participation in AtlantaIX.  We are peered with roughly 60 other ISPs, schools, and government entities including major content sources like Netflix, Amazon, & Google.  This means fast connections, low latency, and high reliability through multi-path redundancy.

On the last day of 2009, we acquired Atlantic Nexus.  Atlantic Nexus brought a staff of high quality support personnel and a large number of DSL subscribers all across North Georgia.  Our pipe into the DSL network expanded and we gained the technology to offer 12M DSL.

We created a captive CLEC in 2014, which allows us to own fiber under public right of way, colocate in ATT central offices and a few other useful things.  We laid our first fiber, a distribution system near our home office, in 2015.  So now, we are facilities based!

Services: Metro-E Fiber Internet - Dedicated T1 - Business DSL - Fault Tolerant Internet - Dial-Up Routed ISDN - Server Colo - DNS Registration - DNS Web E-mail Hosting - Spam Filter

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Other Historically Interesting Articles:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/how-the-robber-barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet.ars