KPNQwest staff threatens shutdown
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Liquidators had gathered enough financial support and promises of money from customers to keep the network online till the end of June, but staff, realizing that the network is unlikely to be sold as a unit, have issued an ultimatum: if a buyer is not found today, they will shut it down.
"We want a deal signed, sealed and delivered or we will shut down," stated Graham Kinsey, an operator at KPNQwest's Brussels, Belgium, network center, in an e-mail quoted in The Financial Times and elsewhere.
Kinsey is among the operators that have been working unpaid to keep the network going since the company's bankruptcy last week.
KPNQwest runs Europe's largest fiber-optic network, carrying one-quarter of the region's IP traffic and providing services for companies such as Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard and Nokia. It is a joint venture between Dutch national carrier KPN and U.S.-based Qwest Communications International.
The dissent appears to come from staff on the Ebone European network, which was bought by KPNQwest earlier this year. Reportedly, 350 Ebone staffers have been working without pay for the last week; published reports have suggested that auditors would move to cut that number to 40.
Unless the staff is bluffing, a shutdown is a real possibility, as there is no expectation that the network could be sold on terms acceptable to them. The company's advice to its major customers has been to move to other suppliers, which would vastly reduce the company's value to any buyer.
Liquidators in the Netherlands, and Bear Stearns, the bank in charge of the process, have not commented on this latest development. They claim to have received some 40 bids for "all or part" of the network. However, no observers expect anyone to bid for the whole network, as all other service providers claim to have more than enough capacity for their current needs.
The liquidators plan to examine the bids and offer "parcels" of the network to different providers next week. If it is turned off Friday, even this option may be lost, as a "dark" network is worth much less than a working one.
As quoted in The Guardian newspaper, Kinsey said that smaller KPNQwest customers had expressed fears that a shutdown might put them out of business.
Separately, an Internet performance-monitoring company said earlier this week that KPNQwest's fiber-optic network has been losing track of the data it delivers at "alarming rates" since last Friday.
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