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Can you guess what that might be?

Well it's been 10 whole years since Xtra first made its lumbering presence onto the Net.

Hands up everyone who remembers that first hideous attempt by Telecom to establish its brand in a market that was previously the domain of small niche players such as Actrix, iProlink, IHUG, and others?

These were the days when Telecom was headed by Texan Don Sledge and the Xtra division was the domain of a Californian going by the name of Chris Tyler.

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Telecom's bold vision for Xtra was to turn it into a media powerhouse and to do this they hired a large team of "producers" who were responsible for creating or rounding up a wealth of content that would then be published through the website at xtra.co.nz.

And boy, do we remember that website!

On the launch day, thousands of people on good old 14.4Kbps and 28.8Kbps dial-up tried to download the front page which, believe it or not, was a single graphic of more than 150Kbytes.

Naturally this was an utter disaster and most simply gave up long before their browser had sucked down even a moderate percentage of that image.

While researching all this, I discovered more clues as to the real age of Aardvark itself.

This issue of Aardvark Weekly from December 1996 shows that the first publication was early in 1996, a couple of months before Xtra came on the scene.

It looks as if 1996 was a real year of botched first-attempts on the web, with NBR's atrocious attempt to become an online media empire also stumbling onto the Net, only to announce eventual defeat and withdrawal. Since its regrouping, the new NBR online is a far more modest publication better suited to the medium.

But back to the good old days...

Right from the start, Xtra believed it would dominate and control the online and ISP marketplace. Ten years later they do have the lion's share of the ISP market but as a web-presence, their site (while "okay") is still not the content-hub they originally planned, and probably never will be.

What's more, now that we've got LLU, it may only be a matter of time before Xtra loses its crown as the dominant ISP, especially after their god-awful performance recently when customers were effectively unable to connect to their broadband services for several days and email was on the fritz.

And speaking of that little fiasco...

Most readers know that I'm a bit of a right-wing redneck at heart and have said many kind things about the ACT party. Well I'm also a realist and try to be objective in my analysis so I've got to say they're barking mad when it comes to their anti-unbundling policy.

How on earth can they not support breaking Telecom's monopoly on broadband services when they admit in their latest (and possibly last) emailed newsletter that The Letter, as a significant email user has suffered constant problems over the years with xtra" and goes on to say "We have been driven mad by Telecom".

If they can't work out the obvious link between a monopoly in the market and a lack of any need to perform then they really ought to go join the Greens.

Rodney, please get your ACT together! :-)

Do you have any comments to add when looking back at the past 10 years of Xtra's life or Telecom's involvement in the ISP/content marketplace?

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