Oops – Did UK Broadband ISP SwishFibre Fail to Renew Domain? UPDATE
The website domain for full fibre network builder and UK ISP Swish Fibre appears to have been offline since yesterday because, according to the notice on its holding page, swishfibre.com has “expired and is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com” (i.e. somebody probably forgot to renew it).
Just to recap, the operator – backed by an investment of £225m from Fern Trading – originally planned to deploy a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover 250,000 premises across the Home Counties of England. But recently both they and some of Fern’s other alternative networks have been hit by a spate of redundancies (example), and we’re starting to wonder if one of those was the webmaster.
According to the online records for swishfibre.com, the domain officially expired on 20th July 2023, and it looks like Swish were probably then given a grace period of a few days to correct that before it fell into GoDaddy’s holding phase. Most webmasters know to check the auto-renewal box for domain registrations in order to avoid this sort of embarrassing issue, but this is something that Swish’s webby team (if they still have one) may have overlooked.
We are currently trying to get a response from Swish, although neither they nor Fern Trading have responded to any of our hails for the past couple of months, but then that was mostly related to our queries about all the job losses and the future of their network consolidation drive (something they seem disinclined to speak about). Hopefully they’ll rectify the domain issue soon, before it becomes more than a brief embarrassment.
UPDATE 10:23am
Some visitors are reporting that the website is back online. Our web browser is now also returning a more general error result and the GoDaddy holding page has gone, which suggests that they may be in the process of updating the records (i.e. it sometimes takes a few hours for a domain change to propagate across different networks).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Seem to be back online been renewed Expiry Date 2024-07-20.
You would think they would of had auto renewal turn on, I know that not totally fool proof since they saved payment card might be expired.
It’s possible with any of the Fern Trading ISPs seemingly rallying behind Giganet, that auto renew was on, but the finance team that managed the card/account no longer exists and so it got bounced, so may not have even been an expiry issue. (Usually hosting providers will warn you repeatedly if you have a renewal, including if your details are out of date – but who knows where the renewals went 🙂 )
Mergers and acquisitions are horrible from an IT perspective, especially if people know redundancies are likely as they’ll keep as much to themselves as possible to add value to themselves.
M&A is always horrible from an employee perspective. From a business perspective, even ignoring knowledge hoarding it’s only afterwards that you find out how much of the business’s knowledge and processes only existed inside somebody’s head. Usually when they’ve been made redundant.
I worked for and ran the sale process for a large IT company (c2k employees), and it was only through the sale process that we found that rather than the six or so locations we thought we had, we were in fact paying leases on 27 different premises, including sites that no current employees knew anything of.
works for me 🙂
Thanks I just registered it – they can have it back for 7.5M 🙂
name checks out
lol. Jokes aside, I think after domain expiry there’s a grace period when the original owner can renew it (at a premium!), but nobody else can.
Given GoDaddy make significant sums of money from auctioning off expired domains, I’m not sure how “customer friendly” their expired domain policy is likely to be.
@ Ben
You’re given multiple renewal notices by domain registrars leading up to expiry (unless turned off) and then there’s an additional grace period after that in which you can still renew. 40 days I think.
After that there is a redemption period which lets you still renew it for a higher fee.
If it goes past that and you have not renewed then I think it’s fair play for the registrar to auction it off.
And the resounding question is… Who cares
You Steve, you went to all this effort to post. You care more than the average person.
As others have said, part of a group who have merged and one that is now offering redundancies… Likely gone to someone who isn’t with or has recently left.
How amature, probably made guy in charge redundant. And using godaddy. Another reason to keep clear of all things Fern trading…….
Weirdly even though Swish is prominent throughout Bordon in Hampshire, on the Swish website it says coming to my area soon. However, on Giganet’s website it says I can have FTTP packages now. No Giganet network here, so are they selling on the back of their Fern Trading partner’s network and Swish ceasing trading?