AboveNet

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AboveNet, Inc.
Type Public ((Pink Sheets: ABVT)
Founded mid-1990s
Headquarters White Plains, NY, USA
Key people Bill LaPerch, CEO
Industry telecommunications
Employees 500 (as of 2008)
Website http://www.above.net/

AboveNet, Inc. is an Internet Service Provider in the United States and Europe. Its services include Internet access, Internet transit, metro Ethernet, dark fiber and end-to-end optical link services including DWDM.

It has extensive metro area fiber networks in 14 US cities and London.

[edit] History

AboveNet was formed in the mid-1990s as a colocation provider in San Jose, California. The company expanded rapidly and IPOed in 1998. In 1999 the company was purchased by Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN), a White Plains, New York-based dark fiber company.

MFN traces its history back to 1993 creating one of the earliest all-fibre 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. At its peak in March 2000, MFN had a market cap of $27 billion, and was a member of the NASDAQ 100 index.

After a series of major accounting errors and management missteps, as well as the collapse of the dot-com bubble, MFN - like many other similar companies, entered a severe liquidity crisis and was unable to obtain additional loans to continue operating. In April 2002, they announced that the financial results for the first three quarters of 2001 would be restated, including a charge of approximate $4 billion, and that they could not file a year-end financial statement. The company filed for Chapter 11 in March 2002.

As part of the Chapter 11 process the company sold off many of its non-core metro networks in the US and mainland Europe, retaining a smaller but more viable footprint.

[edit] The Present

The much smaller, reorganized company changed its name back to AboveNet when emerging from bankruptcy in September 2003, and now trades on the pink sheets as ABVT. Previous shares of MFNX became worthless. The company is now debt free and expanding once more.

It has extensive metro fiber networks in London, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. It connects more than 1000 optically enabled buildings, with more than 1.5 million metro fiber miles. AboveNet's core service offerings include; Dark Fiber, Ethernet, IP, CWDM and DWDM.

[edit] External links