Telecom were sceptical of Demon's projected growth and did not provide for expansion, resulting in a regular shortage of lines and regular re-digs of the top end of Hendon Lane, Finchley, north London to lay down additional cables. Demon moved initially to Energis lines with a Regionally Organised Modem Pool (ROMP) and later added Colt lines to the service so they had more control over which lines new customers used over separate 0845 numbers. In 1995, Demon acquired a 25% stake in competing UK Internet provider Cityscape Internet Services, as part of a deal to move Cityscape's backbone from Pipex to Demon. On 29 September, they acquired the remaining 75% of the company. Demon's early days are described in an interview with Cliff Stanford published in The Independent on 15 January 1996. The public telephone number of the company, and many of the dialup access numbers, end with 666 (the supposed Number of the Beast), a deliberate pun on the name Demon. When Thus plc was formed as a parent of Demon, its randomly allocated company number also ended in 666. Also, after a spate of "access" related names (e.g. gate, post) many of its original servers' hostnames started with dis, being the initial letters of Demon Internet Services as well as the name of a part of Hell in Dante's Inferno and another name for Lucifer. Ownership In June 2008 Cable & Wireless plc made a predatory offer for Demon's parent, Thus. On 1 October 2008, Cable & Wireless completed the takeover of Thus. Cable & Wireless split into two separate businesses on 26 March 2010. Thus and Demon came under the ownership of the original business, which was renamed Cable & Wireless Worldwide. This was purchased by Vodafone in July 2012 which began integrating the business with its own. Thus and Demon were integrated into Vodafone on 1 April 2013. During 2016–2019, the Demon Internet service was slowly wound down with a view to migrating customers over to Vodafone branded products, a process that took longer than expected with some customers still being provided with Demon ADSL at the end of May 2019 due to a large backlog in the processing of migration requests. IRC servers Demon ran IRC servers on both the IRCnet and EFnet networks from 1993 and on QuakeNet later on. In 2009, Demon delinked their server from QuakeNet and EFnet. See also Internet in