As someone who lived in the country during both the beginning of the PC revolution as well as the start of the commercial Internet this really resonates with me.
I remember paying an obscene amount of money to access dialup Internet which was always a long distance call. I lobbied AT&T for an ISDN line and literally was laughed at by the tech who said it would be 25 years before they'd install it.
Two years later I got cable Internet at a whopping speed of 5 mb and it opened up the entire world to me. People in Lansing and Grand Rapids only had the option of buying their own T-1 if they wanted broadband at the time.
I tried to convince the city fathers of the small town I lived in to invest a little in an empty storefront and build out offices for startups with broadband as the lure. I told them they should exploit the small window that existed before everyone in the state had broadband. Sadly they looked at me like I was absolutely stark raving mad.
There was a similar situation around my home town in rural western Ohio. The area served by large incumbent telcos (Ameritech nee Ohio Bell, AT&T, GTE) had cruddy options for Internet service. Before 1995 there wasn't anything that wasn't a long distance call.
A few miles up the road, where the incumbent telco was a consortium of old independent "farm" telephone companies, was flat rate local dialup. Not for us, though. Eventually the independents offered local service in the large incumbent territory too (presumably when it became cost-effective to drop in a T1 and run a modem pool).
In that independent telco area xDSL became an option in the early 2000's. Fiber came shortly after.
In the large incumbent's territory none of that magical high speed stuff was an option until the local cable monopoly started offering service in 2004.
Even now if your wireline distance from the incumbent CO is too great and you live on a less-populous road (where it's not worth the cable company's cost to run cable) there are no wired high speed Internet options at all. (This is in the 25th most populous county of Ohio's 88 counties.)
One of the interesting things about rural USA telecom is that many states, as viewed at a whole-state map level, often do have a patchwork quilt of old rural coop phone companies and small ILECs.
In parts of rural western Canada it's very different, if you're in SK in you've got sasktel, if you're in AB you've got the former AGT (now Telus), if you're in BC you've got the former BCTel (also now Telus).
Comparing WA and BC, in WA there's pockets of small ILECs all over the place which differ wildly in how much they've invested in overbuilding their old POTS wiring for real rural broadband, and different medium to huge sized ILEC entities covering different big population centers. Ziply (former GTE/Frontier), Centurylink, etc.
In BC you've got... Telus. And that's it. And maybe shaw cable if you happen to live kind of near a medium sized city.
I live in a rural place and messed around with satellite and starlink for a while. Finally just buy the bullet and shelled out $25k to get a dedicated fiber line to the house. Now I have 1Gbps down and all I can say is that it was worth every penny.
where do you go for a quote on that? I have charter/spectrum and I suspect they'll just laugh at me. They did offer me cable when I moved in, but I wasn't ready to pay $200 a month at that point. Still probably not.
If I wanted to go down that route I'd probably try to set up a subdivision ISP.
Try to find if there is fiber buried in the area already (look for the poles) and contact whoever that is.
If that doesn’t work, try calling for the business side of the business. But if there isn’t even fiber to the town you’re going to be looking at a huge cost.
We're just off a decent-sized state highway and I wouldn't be surprised (let's say 50/50 or 30/70) if there was fiber at the street and we'd just have to pull it through the subdivision.
I went to ATT to ask for a business line for $500/month which includes them doing the cabling for free but ended up speaking to a bunch of people there and was able to negotiate $25k out of my pocket but only $100/month for a minimum of 2 years.
I went through all the same phases but in Germany. Luckily my dad decided to spring for a floppy for our Apple ][ right from the start, never had to mess with cassette tapes.
Nice to see Watcom C++ mentioned in there. Was far and away my fave in the 90s.
This article is interesting as a lesson, and resonates with the ways I learned about computers and technology in a rural area.
But something else is happening now which is also interesting: rural broadband. As a result of actions taken by President Obama many years ago--according to my family at least--the area where I grew up will be getting broadband internet very soon.
This particular remote area will likely never get mapped on Google Street View, but people who live there will soon be able to watch netflix and do other things we often take for granted online.
Where Starlink is available that helps a lot too. My brother has it up on coastal Maine and I could definitely work up there now--as well as stream videos. That certainly wasn't possible on the old 1Mbps down (on a good day) ADSL that used to be there. AT&T cell is marginal at best too although Verizon is a little better.
incumbent regional ISPs (primarily the historical local phone company and whoever built the first cable TV franchise starting from the 1980s) serving rural areas could do a whole lot more if they didn't waste or outright commit fraud with RDOF, RDOF2, USF, BTOP and other federal subsidy broadband construction funds.
It's a travesty that there are some places that are not very rural at all in the US48 states where the best possible option is a starlink terminal right now. Something like starlink should be used for the REALLY remote and hard to reach places.
this article very slightly mentions the concept of a local calling area (unlimited POTS calling for voice calls, which meant it worked also for dialup modems) within a metro area. the size of such an area could vary widely.
there were some large cities and metro areas such as the seattle calling area which had a HUGE number of BBSes at one point in time, prior to the popularity of the initial dialup ISPs around 1993-1994, because the local calling area was huge.
conversely, if you happened to live in a small town in rural america you'd be paying long distance rates, or maybe waiting until after 10pm for better long distance rates, to call any BBSes.
the market feasibility of the first dialup based ISPs in the era when a 28.8 modem was HIGH SPEED was also very much dependent on the possible customer base in the no-charge local calling area.
Our local BBS had six or seven different “local” numbers depending on where you physically were, which I assume was a deal they rigged with the phone company (as they all terminated at the same machine).
I went through a lot of this as an adult, though in a metro area (yeah, Seattle did have a lot of BBSs...but not all of those area code 206 numbers were local calls from 253!).
At one point, I set up UUCP on a Kaypro 10 CP/M box with a built-in 300 bps modem and exchanged email that way for a few months. It was the only way to get Internet, even in the Seattle area, back in those years.
The key to connectivity on Novell networks was their groupware product, GroupWise. The law firm I worked for had three offices, and for several years we used it to exchange interoffice email powered by a gang of modems (starting at 1200bps and eventually topping out at 9600 before we decided we could make use of a T1). The main office would connect with the branches once an hour. It was life-changing for us in the early 90s.
In addition to the hardware cost, which was extremely high (and being in the UK meant it was substantially higher than the US), but software costs were high too.
Before cheap subscription software, which is so bemoaned nowadays, all the software packages were 10x the cost, and still required repurchasing every year or two. Technically your older copy of Office, Photoshop, etc would still work fine, but you couldn't share documents with people with newer versions, as anything they saved you couldn't open. Those packages were hundreds of pounds each. Piracy was the only way as a teen to be able to actually get any software, I couldn't afford anything, even if I wanted to pay for it. A decent image editor can be had for $5 a month from the App Store now. Office is $10 for the whole family, and includes more storage than every drive I owned for the first 15 years I owned computers.
Even OS upgrades were all expensive. Even up until the early MacOS X versions it cost $129 a year for each version. Dropping it to $29 was a big deal for Snow Leopard, which was 2009.
And back in the late 90s/early 2000s download speeds were so bad that it was easier to pay for linux CDs too. I paid for the big boxed copies of SuSE 6.4 and 7, for example, just to get a good CD with all the packages on it.
Somewhere in that period I also remember when dial-up internet providers started to convert to providing free-phone 0800 (800 numbers in the US), if you paid for an account, and convincing my parents to pay for it, so that we wouldn't be billed by the minute any more. Before that a lot of providers just had toll numbers, so there was no monthly bill, we paid through the phone-line.
Finally I got ADSL in college, and at 8Mbps it was the fastest available in the UK from a tiny, niche ISP, which was effectively a pyramid scheme trying to get enough business through very under-cost, but high speed internet. They went bust after a couple of years, but it was amazing to move from dial-up to >1Mbps speeds.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] threadI remember paying an obscene amount of money to access dialup Internet which was always a long distance call. I lobbied AT&T for an ISDN line and literally was laughed at by the tech who said it would be 25 years before they'd install it.
Two years later I got cable Internet at a whopping speed of 5 mb and it opened up the entire world to me. People in Lansing and Grand Rapids only had the option of buying their own T-1 if they wanted broadband at the time.
I tried to convince the city fathers of the small town I lived in to invest a little in an empty storefront and build out offices for startups with broadband as the lure. I told them they should exploit the small window that existed before everyone in the state had broadband. Sadly they looked at me like I was absolutely stark raving mad.
A few miles up the road, where the incumbent telco was a consortium of old independent "farm" telephone companies, was flat rate local dialup. Not for us, though. Eventually the independents offered local service in the large incumbent territory too (presumably when it became cost-effective to drop in a T1 and run a modem pool).
In that independent telco area xDSL became an option in the early 2000's. Fiber came shortly after.
In the large incumbent's territory none of that magical high speed stuff was an option until the local cable monopoly started offering service in 2004.
Even now if your wireline distance from the incumbent CO is too great and you live on a less-populous road (where it's not worth the cable company's cost to run cable) there are no wired high speed Internet options at all. (This is in the 25th most populous county of Ohio's 88 counties.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incumbent_local_exchange_carri...
In parts of rural western Canada it's very different, if you're in SK in you've got sasktel, if you're in AB you've got the former AGT (now Telus), if you're in BC you've got the former BCTel (also now Telus).
Comparing WA and BC, in WA there's pockets of small ILECs all over the place which differ wildly in how much they've invested in overbuilding their old POTS wiring for real rural broadband, and different medium to huge sized ILEC entities covering different big population centers. Ziply (former GTE/Frontier), Centurylink, etc.
In BC you've got... Telus. And that's it. And maybe shaw cable if you happen to live kind of near a medium sized city.
If I wanted to go down that route I'd probably try to set up a subdivision ISP.
If that doesn’t work, try calling for the business side of the business. But if there isn’t even fiber to the town you’re going to be looking at a huge cost.
Nice to see Watcom C++ mentioned in there. Was far and away my fave in the 90s.
But something else is happening now which is also interesting: rural broadband. As a result of actions taken by President Obama many years ago--according to my family at least--the area where I grew up will be getting broadband internet very soon.
This particular remote area will likely never get mapped on Google Street View, but people who live there will soon be able to watch netflix and do other things we often take for granted online.
Around here that means anything that’s not the literal main streets, and we’re not even far from the real world.
It's a travesty that there are some places that are not very rural at all in the US48 states where the best possible option is a starlink terminal right now. Something like starlink should be used for the REALLY remote and hard to reach places.
there were some large cities and metro areas such as the seattle calling area which had a HUGE number of BBSes at one point in time, prior to the popularity of the initial dialup ISPs around 1993-1994, because the local calling area was huge.
conversely, if you happened to live in a small town in rural america you'd be paying long distance rates, or maybe waiting until after 10pm for better long distance rates, to call any BBSes.
the market feasibility of the first dialup based ISPs in the era when a 28.8 modem was HIGH SPEED was also very much dependent on the possible customer base in the no-charge local calling area.
At one point, I set up UUCP on a Kaypro 10 CP/M box with a built-in 300 bps modem and exchanged email that way for a few months. It was the only way to get Internet, even in the Seattle area, back in those years.
The key to connectivity on Novell networks was their groupware product, GroupWise. The law firm I worked for had three offices, and for several years we used it to exchange interoffice email powered by a gang of modems (starting at 1200bps and eventually topping out at 9600 before we decided we could make use of a T1). The main office would connect with the branches once an hour. It was life-changing for us in the early 90s.
In addition to the hardware cost, which was extremely high (and being in the UK meant it was substantially higher than the US), but software costs were high too.
Before cheap subscription software, which is so bemoaned nowadays, all the software packages were 10x the cost, and still required repurchasing every year or two. Technically your older copy of Office, Photoshop, etc would still work fine, but you couldn't share documents with people with newer versions, as anything they saved you couldn't open. Those packages were hundreds of pounds each. Piracy was the only way as a teen to be able to actually get any software, I couldn't afford anything, even if I wanted to pay for it. A decent image editor can be had for $5 a month from the App Store now. Office is $10 for the whole family, and includes more storage than every drive I owned for the first 15 years I owned computers.
Even OS upgrades were all expensive. Even up until the early MacOS X versions it cost $129 a year for each version. Dropping it to $29 was a big deal for Snow Leopard, which was 2009.
And back in the late 90s/early 2000s download speeds were so bad that it was easier to pay for linux CDs too. I paid for the big boxed copies of SuSE 6.4 and 7, for example, just to get a good CD with all the packages on it.
Somewhere in that period I also remember when dial-up internet providers started to convert to providing free-phone 0800 (800 numbers in the US), if you paid for an account, and convincing my parents to pay for it, so that we wouldn't be billed by the minute any more. Before that a lot of providers just had toll numbers, so there was no monthly bill, we paid through the phone-line.
Finally I got ADSL in college, and at 8Mbps it was the fastest available in the UK from a tiny, niche ISP, which was effectively a pyramid scheme trying to get enough business through very under-cost, but high speed internet. They went bust after a couple of years, but it was amazing to move from dial-up to >1Mbps speeds.