The Net
Het Net was introduced in 1997 by KPN (then PTT Telecom) as a national Internet. At that time, Internet access was still mostly via the telephone line, requiring monthly subscription fees to be paid to an Internet provider in addition to telephone taps. The Net was to provide a low-threshold answer to this.
What was remarkable about Het Net was that users were given an e-mail address linked to their phone number, but more importantly the network was limited to the Netherlands. Whereas Internet technology made the world smaller by connecting users worldwide, the traffic and information within Het Net was deliberately limited to our own country.
With the rise of "free" access providers (where customers only had to pay for phone taps), Het Net soon had more disadvantages than advantages for users. In fact, by paying providers a fee for their customers' dial-up minutes, KPN itself contributed to the rise of free providers. In 1999, KPN organizationally merged Het Net into its subsidiary Planet Internet in order to transform the service into a regular Internet service provider (ISP), which later began offering Internet access via ADSL.
By acquiring several other providers, KPN soon had a wide range of brands. To save costs and benefit more from the strong KPN brand, many of these labels were scrapped over the years. In 2009, the small 700,000 customers of Het Net were also transferred to KPN itself.
