History

A new Tucows business is born—Wavelo! This new telecom SaaS platform launches to shake up the global OSS/BSS market, offering flexible software that helps telecom operators derive more value from their networks and deliver more value to their customers.

The introduction of Wavelo’s flexible and scalable software has been critical in supporting DISH’s MVNO ecosystem, anchored by Boost Mobile, and their 5G rollout across the United States.

Ting announces three of its largest markets to-date, all within the first half of 2022: Alexandria, Virginia; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Aurora, Colorado.

The Tucows Downloads site officially retires. The iconic TUCOWS software library played an integral role in sowing the seeds for the Tucows we know today and its importance in the early distribution of software and in the history of the Internet itself cannot be overstated. Tucows Downloads has been saved by the Internet Archive.

Ting Internet expands its U.S. footprint and enters Arizona with an acquisition of Simply Bits. As part of this deal, Ting assumes all of Simply Bits’ existing infrastructure and customers, adding approximately 4,500 customers to the Tucows family.

Tucows Domains acquires UNR Corp’s registry platform service, complementing Tucows’ existing reseller and retail domain services.

Tucows is named one of Greater Toronto’s Top Employers for a second time, recognized for our employee culture and growth opportunities amidst our rapid expansion as an organization.

Ting Mobile signs a monumental deal to become DISH’s technology partner. This collaboration disrupts the retail wireless market and prepares customers for DISH’s first virtualized, standalone 5G network.

In key locations such as Charlottesville, Holly Springs, and Fuquay-Varina, Ting Internet launches its fiber-fed, weatherproof access points (APs) which allow community members to publicly access the internet. This project makes connecting for work or school more accessible during the pandemic.

With Tucows acquisition of Ascio Technologies, Tucows is able to make the Internet better in more countries. Ascio’s resellers now benefit from Tucows’ customer-focused approach and domain expertise.

Making the community the second Ting Town in California and the tenth Ting Town in the U.S.

Ting Internet hits a new milestone with the strategic acquisition of Cedar Holdings Group, strengthening Ting’s fiber networks in Colorado and adding approximately 6,400 addresses to the Ting family.

After acquiring Melbourne IT’s international wholesale domain reseller channel in 2016, Tucows acquired Enom in 2017, establishing itself as the second largest domain name registrar and largest wholesale registrar in the world.

Ting lights up its first customer in Charlottesville, Virginia with fiber-to-the-home, symmetrical Gigabit per second Internet service. This launched a new mission to bring crazy fast fiber Internet and crazy good customer service to homes and businesses across the country and shake up a cable industry that desperately needed shaking.

In February 2012, Tucows launched Ting, a mobile phone service dedicated to bringing clarity and control to US mobile phone customers.

On July 31, Tucows rebranded its wholesale Reseller services division as OpenSRS. Resellers’ sustained loyalty to OpenSRS was one reason behind the decision to re-launch the brand, and key to that loyalty is the company’s reputation as the most reseller-friendly among Internet services wholesalers.

On October 29, Tucows launches YummyNames. The new service provides exclusive access to a large selection of premium domain names from the Tucows Domain Name Portfolio. Created especially with marketers in mind, YummyNames allows people to search for and obtain the perfect domain name for their organization from tens of thousands of high-quality domain names.

On December 8, Tucows rebranded its retail division as Hover, providing consumers with a hassle-free domain management service that makes it easy for anyone to buy a domain name, set up a personalized email address and connect a domain name to all of their web services – in seconds.

On May 23, Tucows introduced the next generation of Tucows Email Service. The new email platform featured AJAX-enabled webmail, and competitive storage and features.

On July 31, a radical redesign of Tucows downloads, one of the most popular software download sites in the world, is launched to enhance overall user experience, including new social networking features.

On November 19, Tucows announces two programs, Parked Pages Program and Expired Domains Program. Both offer additional sources of revenue to resellers, including a slice of the growing domain name re-sale market through a share of Tucows Premium Domains service sales revenues.

In January, Tucows completed the acquisition of Critical Path’s Hosted Messaging Business. With this acquisition the company became a leading provider of hosted email services, provisioning millions of mailboxes.

Understanding the secondary market for domain names represented a new source of revenue for Tucows and our services provider customers, the company Domain Name Auctions and Parked Pages to its wholesale offerings, in February.

On June 19, Tucows completed the acquisition of Mailbank.com Inc. (doing business as NetIdentity). The acquisition of this large portfolio of surname-based domains extends opportunity to offer personalized web services to the wholesale channel.

On August 26, Tucows purchased the online calendar service Kiko.

In May, Tucows enhances its software download site by adding capacity and improving usability.

Shares of common stock in Tucows commence trading on the American Stock Exchange (AMEX:TCX) and on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX:TC), on August 19.

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Tucows reached 4 million domain names under management, in March.

In April, Email Defense, an anti-spam service, was added to the wholesale service line.

Also in April, Tucows acquired Boardtown Corporation, the producers of the Platypus Billing System and Wombat Help Desk for Internet service providers.

Tucows launched Blogware, the first wholesale blogging service for ISPs and webhosting companies, in May.

The wholesale service line was expanded to include Website Building tools, in June.

In February, Tucows began offering email services to and for distribution by service providers. Managed DNS was added to the wholesale service line, in December.

In May, Tucows launched the first EPP-based global registry management service, Liberty Registry Management Services (LibertyRMS), for generic top-level domains (gTLDs) including .info. LibertyRMS had an exclusive two-year contract with Afilias to provide the registry operations for the new generic top-level domain .info. Tucows has since sold LibertyRMS to Afilias.

On August 28, Tucows merged with Infonautics, Inc., an Internet information services company. On completion of the merger, Infonautics changed its name to Tucows Inc. The company was quoted on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board under the symbol “TCOW.”

The company began accepting domain name registrations from ISPs and web hosting companies through the OpenSRS platform in January 2000. At first, registrations were available under .com, .net and .org. In the fall, Tucows added .uk and .ca to its service line. Since 2000, Tucows has continued to add new top-level domains including the gTLDs .info, .biz, and .name, and the ccTLDs .tv (Tuvalu), .cc (Cocos), .us (United States), .cn (China), and .de (Germany).

When the domain name registration monopoly was opened to competition in 1999, Tucows used the opportunity to leverage its experience and relationships with Internet service providers and grow into new areas. The company applied for and received its registrar accreditation from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) in April 1999.

Internet Direct was one of the first of Tucows mirror sites.

Internet service providers (ISPs) and other partner sites around the world began ‘mirroring’ Tucows software libraries to provide fast, local downloads to their end-users and save on bandwidth costs.

The origins of what is now Tucows began in Flint, Michigan in 1993. While working for local libraries, Scott Swedorski noticed the public’s increasing interest in the World Wide Web and used his personal website to offer downloadable software. He dubbed this service TUCOWS, an acronym for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software, which quickly gained recognition as the first site to offer software on a freeware or shareware basis.