Many of the international calls people made around 2000 crossed the ocean as internet packets, and they never knew it. iBasis was one of the companies that carried them. It sold this service wholesale to phone carriers, which passed the calls on to their own customers. Old international calling ran on costly dedicated circuits. When iBasis filed to go public in 1999, internet calling was cheap, a little rough, and growing fast.

A Network Behind the Carriers

Ofer Gneezy and Gordon VanderBrug started iBasis in 1996 in the Boston area, and it began service in May 1997. They placed gateways in cities around the world that turned voice into data and back again. Carriers handed iBasis calls to hard-to-reach countries, and iBasis routed them over the internet. The bet was that voice would become just another kind of data. Getting the call quality right was the hard part.

Ending Up Dutch

iBasis priced its IPO at $16 a share in November 1999 and listed on Nasdaq as IBAS. The stock rose in the bubble and fell hard after it. The company kept going and grew into one of the largest wholesale carriers of international voice traffic. In 2007 it combined with the international wholesale arm of KPN, the Dutch phone company, which took a majority stake. KPN bought the rest of iBasis in December 2009 and took it off Nasdaq.

Cover: Hanging Rock, Echo City, Andrew Joseph Russell. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an echo across canyon rocks (a voice carried far).