About Us
An Introduction to CIX
Based in Croydon, South London, CIX (originally Compulink Information eXchange) is a trading name of ICUK offering advanced Internet communications for both the home and business user.
Our product range in very broad terms consists of:
- Broadband
- Leased Lines
- VoIP Voice Solutions
- Shared Web Hosting
- Domain Registration & Management Services
- Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
- Online Forum Conferencing
CIX customers benefit from our world-class technical support, with emails typically answered within minutes and telephone calls answered within seconds. Thanks to our automated control panel, all hosting, internet, and telecom customers can manage and configure their services at any time, day or night, without the need to submit requests for an operations engineer to make changes on their behalf. This allows us to focus on continually improving our services and developing new products and projects.
We are always looking for feedback on how we can improve the services and products we offer. If you have any comments or suggestions about anything listed on this site, please contact us and let us know what you think.
Where it all began
Timeline
1983
Founded as Compulink User Group by Frank and Sylvia Thornley, it began life as a FidoNet bulletin board system initially intended to distribute public domain and shareware software, soon an early form of email was added and discussions broke out. At this point the Compulink BBS was the central node in the UK for Fidomail, using SEAdog to transfer email to and from the US via a dial-up modem connection.
1986
CoSy was purchased from the University of Guelph, this was VMS code and was ported to Unix System V.3 running on an NCR Tower 32/200. Later this year the Conferencing / Email system went live for testing allowing up to 6 concurrent users via a mixture of Dowty Quattro 2400 baud and Hayes 1200/75 modems.
1987
CIX (Compulink Information eXchange) was commercially launched.
1988
CIX moved from Woodbridge Road, Guildford to The Sanctuary, Surbiton. CIX modems were now in the London dialling code so was a local for for a lot more people, there was still no dial-up Internet in the UK at this point.
1988
CIX changed to using a Bleasdale computer based on a Motorola 68020 processor running Unix System V which could handle up to 72 concurrent modem connections. We would see all the modems online during the off-peak evening periods.
1990
CIX moved to a Sequent S27 computer. This quad processor 80386 would handle 128 modem connections. We would still see all the modems online during off-peak periods.
1991
Offline readers started to become popular with CIX. Various OLRs were written, Lucy and Nicola for AmigaOS and Matrix / CIXterm for DOS. This changed CIX dramatically, making it much cheaper to use due to reduced dial-up costs, here was still no dial-up Internet in the UK at this time. This also allowed CIX to be used where there was no connection.
August 1995
0845 Local call numbers for much of the country introduced for CIX and CIX Internet.
January 1996
CIX starts its own dial-up Internet service, CIX Internet, using US Robotics Total Control racked modems / ISDN adaptors. CIX also sees a rebranding.
1998
In March 1998 a management buy-in backed by Legal & General Ventures was completed.
1999
CIX Conferencing moves to a Sun E250 running Solaris, all CIX's servers and modems now hosted in Telehouse.
2000
In 2000 CIX was sold to Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company. CIX was re-branded and merged with XTML of Manchester and Norsk Data of Newbury to form the UK arm of Nextra, the UK Internet subsidiary of Telenor.
2001
WCS (Web Conferencing System) released. First Web-based interface for CIX goes live.
July 2002
CIX Conferencing management was out-sourced by Nextra to Parkglobe Consultants which was made up of ex-CIX staff. Later, the entire business was sold to GX Networks aka Pipex with the outsourcing remaining.
2005
CIX Forums released with new branding. Version 2 of the Web-based interface for CIX goes live driven by a REST API.
May 2011
On 25th May 2011, CIX Online Ltd. was purchased by ICUK, an ISP, hosting and telecoms provider formed in November 2001 by an ex-employee of CIX.
May 2023
CIX adds in-house developed hosted VoIP and SIP trunk telephony solutions to its portfolio.