For the most part, I don't think the companies in question were really thinking about the internet at all in this era. Typical intended services would be voice,

For the most part, I don't think the companies in question were really thinking about the internet at all in this era. Typical intended services would be voice, analog cable TV and Videotex in the short term, with the intention to upgrade to digital cable and video on demand and eventually circuit-switched broadband ISDN that would allow you to effectively call up another computer and transfer data at relatively high speed. Remember, these are telephone companies - they were strongly biased towards thinking in telephone-centric metaphors and coming up with designs based on how the telephone network worked. There was a whole ecosystem of telecom-designed networking like ATM that was effectively rendered obsolete by the Internet and packet switching. (Even BT's internal systems and phone switching mostly run over their own slightly oddball version of IP-based networking these days.)