What was PowerNet Online?
PowerNet Online LLC was the first sizable company built by Jamie Dolan — a local Internet Service Provider for the Fox Cities of Wisconsin (Appleton, Neenah, Menasha and Oshkosh). (He’d gotten his start a few years earlier doing graphic design in his first couple of years of high school, under the name Squirrel Publishing.) Jamie founded PowerNet in 1996 and ran it as president — at seventeen — alongside his father, Tim Dolan, its co-owner. Through the late 1990s it grew from dial-up accounts into a full local internet company: 56K and ISDN dial-up, dedicated T1 lines, web & domain hosting, website design, e-mail, and computer repair, serving around 1,500 Fox Valley households and businesses.
It ran on PortMaster modem banks, T1 circuits, a 3Com chassis and Solaris (x86) servers out of an office at 304 Appleton Street, Menasha, and it was proud to be the “Official ISP of the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers.” In 2000 it became a subsidiary of DigiCorporation (in Neenah, with an internet café on Midway Road) and the main brand became USPower.Net. The dial-up business wound down through the mid-2000s — clearly fading by 2006, with a handful of modems perhaps still answering until around 2008 (Jamie had moved on by then, so the exact final date is a little hazy). The whole thing is a small, very 1990s story about getting a town online.
Quick facts
- Founder
- Jamie Dolan (president)
- Co-owner
- Tim Dolan, Jamie’s father
- Where
- Menasha & the Fox Cities, WI
- Era
- 1996 – late 2000s
- Was
- local dial-up / ISDN / T1 ISP + hosting + repair
- Became
- a subsidiary of DigiCorporation (2000)
- Phone
- (920) 725-5015
