History
Comway was founded in 1987 by an American-European team with headquarters in Cupertino (California, USA) and Munich (Germany), funded by three private equity firms from the Silicon Valley. Already at that time the vision was to develop and operate technological leading telecommunication systems also operated for third parties under their own brand names.
In our development centres in Cupertino and Munich we developed and operated one of the first worldwide online networks with graphical user interface, years before the www became famous. Our own operations were marketed under the name "Connect". OEM-wise the system was run for international large customers under their brand name. The Connect users were mostly business customers with substantial international travel activities and communication needs like international advertising and press agencies, IT/Telecommunication enterprises and consulting companies. The Connect system was operated on mainframes and had full email functionality, forum functionality (similarly to today's www sites) and a very sophisticated search functionality over all contents (similar to today's search engines). It was already available in 1990 in over 50 countries. Connect users with Windows and Apple Macintosh PCs and laptops went online via about 1.000 global access points in these countries. During the expansion the Connect assets were put in a separate company. Connect Inc. went public in 1996 being traded on the NASDAQ (Symbol: CNKT).
Based on the experience of many years with world-wide data networks Comway developed the business field "Internet access" since 1994 in co-operation with IBM and AT&T. As an "Early mover" in this exponentially growing market world-wide access was offered via a choice of dial-in and fixed lines as well as the necessary front end programs. The customers for this business field again came from international businesses. The OEM capability and thus adaptability of the Comway systems was very important for serving large customers. After the pure Internet access became an ever more commodity product Comway handed the business over to its partners IBM and AT&T.
Beginning 1997 Comway parallely focused on the Public Internet Access market. Products and services in this market are far more demanding from a technical and administrative point of view. Comway accordingly enhanced its hardware, software and network components for the operation of Internet PCs in publicly accessible locations. The adaptability to OEM customers, data security in the public domain and the complete administration for the OEM customer (authentication, authorisation, accounting, and support of the end users) are key issues for these offerings. Comway has nearly 20 years of experience with respect to these issues. Since 2002 we have extended our product portfolio with wireless public access products using the WLAN technology.
