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BT lab domain grab – 17 years after cheeky chap swiped 'em

Adastral Park bundle on sale for a cool 10 Bitcoin

BT research campus Adastral Park can finally buy up its domain names – just 17 years after giving a chap the sack for registering them.

Way back in 2000, BT rebranded its tech research campus – based in Suffolk, England, and formerly known as BT Labs – as Adastral Park.

However, it was slow off the mark when it came to registering a domain to match, and a BT contractor, Ric Hayman, snapped up adastralpark.com, adastralpark.co.uk and adastralpark.net.

He told El Reg at the time: "I only bought it because it was there. You wouldn't walk by a £20 note on the floor and not pick it up, would you?"

Unfortunately for Hayman, BT didn't see the funny side, and he claimed that he was given the boot shortly after.

Instead, the group registered adastral.co.uk for Adastral Park, which plays host to almost 100 companies, including Huawei, Cisco and Intel.

But, should the tech firms want to unite to buy back the controversial domains, they now can, as a Reg reader has tipped us off that the domain bundle is up for sale.

That includes the offending three domains above, as well as adastral.com and adastral-park.co.uk.

And because it's 2017, the price is obviously in Bitcoin: 10 of them, to be precise. At the time of writing, that's a mere £72,711.45.

Given BT just reported a 4 per cent drop in net income in its latest results, we're not convinced it’s going to jump at the chance.

Nonetheless, we've asked Adastral Park if they are thinking about making a purchase and will update the story if we hear back. ®

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