Paradyne - the last miles of the analogue era - Squeezing usable data rates out of the copper that was already in the ground.

Paradyne built modems and data transmission equipment through the period when the access line was the constraint on everything. Its problem was the one the whole industry shared and few companies specialised in: the wire between a building and the network was already installed, could not be replaced economically, and was never designed for data.

Paradyne was formed in 1969 in Largo, Florida, to supply computer communications systems, and spent the 1970s and 1980s in the high-end modem market against Motorola Codex, Racal-Milgo and the equipment divisions of AT&T and IBM. That market existed at all because of regulation rather than technology: the Carterfone decision and the inquiries that followed forced open the right to attach equipment to the telephone network, and an industry appeared in the space the ruling created.

The high end mattered more than the phrase suggests. Corporate data ran over leased analogue lines, and squeezing more bits through a fixed circuit was worth paying for, so modems were engineering products with real margins rather than commodities. Everything that made that business good - long leases, few suppliers, customers who could not easily switch - dissolved when the circuits went digital.

It became AT&T Paradyne in 1989, returned to independence as Paradyne Networks in 1996, and was acquired by Zhone Technologies in 2005. The trajectory is the ordinary fate of a customer-premises equipment vendor: the value that once sat in the box moved into the network itself, and a company that made expensive endpoints for expensive circuits had nothing left to be expensive about.

Paradyne ↗

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