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Verio is an ISP in the United States. Incorporated in 1996 in Denver, Colorado, it is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications which purchased it in 2000. Verio performed the first national consolidation in the ISP industry, and its sale was the largest cash buy-out of a high-tech company by a foreign entity in United States history requiring approval by Congress and the President.

Initially, Verio raised funds with which to purchase regional small "mom and pop" ISPs around the USA and Europe. It was funded by the principal founders, private investors, NTT, and institutional investors in a private placement raising $250 million dollars. The concept was to "roll up" small ISPs into one large national ISP and achieve economies of scale with a single internet infrastructure, a single branded product line, a unified support structure, and so forth. This type of regional rollup into a national brand is common in many industries, but was the first of its kind on a national scale in the newly-evolving ISP industry.

By the year 2000, Verio had purchased almost fifty small ISPs, most in the USA but some in Europe, ranging in price from under a million dollars (USD) to over 100 million dollars per ISP. During this time Verio went public on the NASDAQ, trading under the symbol VRIO. In early 2000 Verio was sold to NTT at a per-share price of over $60, a total cost slightly exceeding $5 billion. Because NTT is a Japanese government owned company, foreigners are not allowed to own NTT stock (according to Japanese law) and therefore the buy-out was a 100% cash deal. This was and still remains the largest cash transaction for a high-tech company in United States history. The United States Congress held hearings over the transaction to ensure it did not violate national security concerns, because the Verio Internet backbone was at the time one of the top five in the world, carrying a large amount of potentially sensitive data. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. expressed concern that the Japanese government, which owned 53 percent of NTT at the time, could gain access to classified information should the U.S. government use Verio's network to tap Internet communications during an investigation. To placate these concerns, NTT agreed to form a separate division within the company staffed only by U.S. citizens to handle any work in support of government investigations. As a result, the Federal Commission on Foreign Investment in the United States recommended that President Clinton allow the $5.5 billion purchase to proceed. The deal also prompted scrutiny of Japan's openness to foreign telecom competitors.

Within months of the announced deal, the NASDAQ stock market crashed in the spring of 2000 in the dot-com bubble burst. The agreed price of around $60 remained and NTT and Verio completed the transaction by the fall of 2000.

Over the course of the next few years Verio abandoned the lower revenue consumer market and focused primarily on the more lucrative business to business web hosting market. Most of the original infrastructure and employees it had purchased were disbanded or consolidated into a few large centralized data centers.

Verio continues to operate as a division of NTT using the brandname NTT/VERIO.

Some of the ISPs purchased by Verio

• Access One (accessone.com) Western Washington
• AimNet (aimnet.com) Santa Clara, California
• ATMNet (atmnet.net) San Diego, California
• Best Net (best.net)
• Branch Net (branch.net, branch.com) Ann Arbor, Michigan
• CCNet (ccnet.com) Walnut Creek, California
• Clark Internet Services (ClarkNet) (clark.net, clarknet.net, smartconnect.net), Columbia, Maryland
• Communique (cmq.net) Gulf South
• Computing Engineers, Inc. (dba WorldWide Access) (wwa.com, wwa.net), Chicago, Illinois
• Florida Internet (flinet.com) South Florida
• Global Enterprise Services (ges.net, ges.com) New Jersey
• Hiway Technologies (hiway.com, hiway.net, hway.com, hway.net, rapidsite.net, rapidsite.com) Boca Raton, Florida
• Internet Information Services (IIS), Bethesda, Maryland
• Internet Interstate (intr.net) Bethesda, Maryland
• Inetnet Now (inetnow.net) Atlanta, Georgia
• iServer (iserver.net, iserver.com, secure.net) Orem, Utah
• JVNC (jvnc.net) New Jersey
• Long Island Internet (li.net) Long Island, New York
• MagicNet (magicnet.net) Florida
• MidNet (mid.net) Kansas
• Monumental Network Services (MNS), (monumental.net, monumental.com, mns.com, mns.net, mnsinc.com, mnsinc.net) Chantilly, Virginia
• National Knowledge Network (NKN) (nkn.net, nkn.com, nkn.edu) Dallas, Texas
• Network Intensive (ni.net, compute.com) Irvine, California
• Northwest Network Services (NorthWestNet), Poulsbo, Washington
• NS Net (ns.net) Sacramento, California
• OnRamp (onramp.net) Dallas, Texas
• Pacific Rim (pacificrim.com, pacificrim.net) Bellingham, Washington
• PacketWorks (packet.net) Tampa Bay, Florida
• Pioneer Global (pioneerglobal.com, pn.net, wing.net) New England
• PrepNet (prep.net, prepnet.net, prepnet.com) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• QualNet/IAGNet (qual.net, qualnet.net, iagnet.net, cic.net, cyberdrive.net, harborcom.com) Cleveland, Ohio (+17 Midwestern Cities)
• RAINet (rain.net, rain.com) Oregon
• RustNet (rust.net) Michigan
• ServiceTech (servtech.com) New York, New York
• SesquiNet (sesqui.net) Houston, Texas
• SigNet (sig.net) Austin, Texas
• Spacelab (spacelab.net, mxol.com) New York, New York
• Starnet (starnet.net) Ohio
• Structured (structured.net, sns-access.com) Oregon
• Surf Networks (surfnetwork.net, p3.net, dynanet.net) Philadelphia
• Tab Net (tab.net, tabnet.net, criticalpath.net, cp.net) Napa Valley, California
• TerraNet (terra.net, terranet.net, terranet.com) New England
• West Coast Online (wco.com) Rohnert Park, California¹
• Web Communications (WebCom) Santa Cruz, California WebCom

¹West Coast Online holds the distinction as the first ISP that Verio - at that time known as "World-Net Access, Inc." - invested in, 31 July, 1996.

External link

• Verio Homepage

• Internet service providers