Demon Internet Broadband

Demon Internet holds a specific place in the history of the British internet. When it launched on 1 June 1992, getting online in the UK cost a substantial amount of money and required either a university affiliation or a corporate account. Demon changed that. Its founder Cliff Stanford offered the UK's first flat-rate home internet service at £10 a month plus VAT, crowdfunding the startup through the CIX bulletin board system (an early pre-web online discussion service) by asking 200 people to send him a cheque. The money raised bought a 64 kilobit leased line (a dedicated telephone circuit used to carry data) and a single computer with eight modems. The service launched on time. By 1997, when Demon was sold to Scottish Telecom for £66 million, it had 230,000 subscribers. At the time it was still making an operating loss.

What the service offered

Demon's original product was dial-up (internet access via the standard telephone line using a modem, which occupied the line and disconnected when finished). At £10 a month plus VAT for unlimited access, it was priced well below what other routes to the internet cost at the time. Each customer received a .demon.co.uk email address and full TCP/IP access (the standard set of network protocols that allowed computers to communicate with each other across the internet), with a static IP address (a fixed internet address that did not change between connections, useful for running servers and for reliable remote access). The company's helpline number ended in 666, a deliberate joke on the Demon name; many of its original servers had hostnames beginning with the letters "dis", standing for Demon Internet Services but also the name of a region of Hell in Dante's Inferno.

Demon moved into ADSL broadband (the technology that replaced dial-up, using the telephone line to carry much faster always-on internet connections) alongside its dial-up business as the technology became available in the early 2000s. It offered broadband packages to both residential and business customers. By the time Thus plc, its parent company, was acquired by Cable & Wireless in 2008, Demon had evolved into a service with both consumer and business divisions, though the business and corporate market had become its primary focus. Consumer broadband was available through ADSL packages on BT's Wholesale platform, without the LLU investment that competitors such as Easynet and Be had made.

The ownership chain

Demon's corporate history was a long sequence of acquisitions. Cliff Stanford sold it to Scottish Telecom in 1997 for £66 million. Scottish Telecom rebranded as Thus plc in October 1999 and floated on the London Stock Exchange. Thus demerged from its parent ScottishPower in 2002. In June 2008, Cable & Wireless made a takeover offer for Thus, completing the acquisition on 1 October 2008 at a price that valued Thus at around £330 million. Cable & Wireless split into two separate businesses in March 2010; Thus and Demon fell under Cable & Wireless Worldwide, the enterprise-facing division. Cable & Wireless Worldwide was acquired by Vodafone in July 2012 for £1.044 billion. Thus and Demon were formally integrated into Vodafone on 1 April 2013.

Under Vodafone, Demon operated as a legacy brand on a shrinking base of dial-up and ADSL customers. Vodafone had no strategic interest in maintaining a consumer ISP brand and the customer base was declining. In January 2019, Vodafone announced its intention to close Demon and migrate its remaining approximately 15,000 customers, predominantly small businesses, to Vodafone's own services. The process took longer than anticipated; some customers were still on Demon ADSL at the end of May 2019 due to a backlog in migration requests. The demon.co.uk domain was redirected to Vodafone's website.

The legal case

Demon Internet was involved in one of the earliest and most significant UK court cases about internet service providers and liability. In 1999, a case known as Godfrey v Demon Internet established that ISPs can be held legally responsible for defamatory content on their systems if they have been notified about it and fail to remove it. The ruling had lasting consequences for how UK internet providers approached user-generated content and complaints about hosted material.

In summary

Demon Internet was one of the most significant companies in the history of the UK internet, not because of the size it eventually became but because of what it did at the start. Its £10 flat-rate dial-up service in 1992 made the internet genuinely accessible to ordinary people, not just researchers and corporate employees, at a time when every other path online cost far more. Its dial-up focus became a commercial weakness as broadband took hold; successive owners struggled to reposition it, and Vodafone eventually closed it having inherited rather than chosen the brand. What it achieved in 1992 was not replicated by any of the companies that subsequently owned its name.