3 ms·

Were they really thinking that the phone companies would install T1 lines in everyone's house?

by msh 3y ago

retrac 3y ago
Not in a literal sense. The article mentions T1 probably not because literally expecting literal T-1 service on coax, but because T-1 used to be used as a metric of bandwidth. It's 24 standard voice circuits (12 and 24 being traditional groupings for voice circuits). It's approximately 1.5 mbit/s. This is about the minimum bandwidth required to make standard definition MPEG-1 video work. That was by design -- it was the bandwidth of a 1x CD-ROM drive or a T1 line. The phone companies eventually did provision that much bandwidth to each home. And not that much long after. DSL at 1 mbit/s was around by 1997.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  The port on the back of the Apple STB is actually literally a T1/E1 port (even though it looks like TP Ethernet), with a Brooktree Bt8069-Series Line Interface Unit chip inside for a T1/E1 interface! I'm not sure if there were T1 adapters for DSL etc back in the day, but I guess that's plausible (before the computer world won over the telecom world there were a lot of weird standards that looked like they would be adopted - ATM anyone?) edit: Apparently T1 started being carried over HDSL which is probably what was being used here https://www.arcelect.com/HDSL3698.htm https://www.arcelect.com/HDSL3698.htm
bombcar 3y ago
I knew a few who got a T1 line "installed to (their) house" as the song goes. There was a quite spicy time very early on where many things seemed potentially reasonable (ISDN, T1, etc) before DSL and DOCSIS took over everything.
- grishka 3y ago
  It's interesting to see how differently it all worked out in the US. I've never seen or heard about T1, I personally went from dial-up straight to Ethernet. Some people used to use ADSL. DOCSIS is also still a thing, but it's being replaced with better technologies (the slow uplink is meh).
  - bombcar 3y ago
    For awhile "poor man's ISDN" was a thing with some local ISPs - you'd get something on your end that could shotgun multiple 56k modems, and they'd be able to bond them together.
- wmf 3y ago
  Wasn't a T1 around $1,500 per month in 1995? Imagine using such expensive service to deliver... TV.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The one I knew the price of was about $450 a month (maybe in 98?) but that was because there was some local completion and ISPs as such already existed vs ISPs using the local telco monopoly.
classichasclass 3y ago
(author) I had a residential T1 line for many years, and a friend of mine had one even earlier when most of us were still on dialup. It was certainly as possible as anything else was at the time.
xp84 3y ago
I’m more shocked at the notion of the T1, HDSL or whatever being run all the way to this STB. Imagine 1.5Mbps of bandwidth straight to your house and only being able to use it with this one limited device! But of course, the Web and lots of other goodies normal people might want to do online were not even close to mature yet. So this could plausibly be your only network-connected device. Wild.
- wmf 3y ago
  Yes, the interactive TV stuff in the 1990s was kind of a bet against the Internet. It's amazing to me that multiple companies developed entire systems that were 10x-100x too expensive to bring to market; I guess they hadn't heard that too early is the same as wrong.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  And in 1995 the total Internet bandwidth between the UK and the USA was basically a T1 IIRC.

Were they really thinking that the phone companies would install T1 lines in everyone's house?

by msh 3y ago

Were they really thinking that the phone companies would install T1 lines in everyone's house?

Not in a literal sense. The article mentions T1 probably not because literally expecting literal T-1 service on coax, but because T-1 used to be used as a metric of bandwidth. It's 24 standard voice circuits (12 and 24 being traditional groupings for voice circuits). It's approximately 1.5 mbit/s. This is about the minimum bandwidth required to make standard definition MPEG-1 video work. That was by design -- it was the bandwidth of a 1x CD-ROM drive or a T1 line. The phone companies eventually did provision that much bandwidth to each home. And not that much long after. DSL at 1 mbit/s was around by 1997.

kalleboo 3y ago
The port on the back of the Apple STB is actually literally a T1/E1 port (even though it looks like TP Ethernet), with a Brooktree Bt8069-Series Line Interface Unit chip inside for a T1/E1 interface! I'm not sure if there were T1 adapters for DSL etc back in the day, but I guess that's plausible (before the computer world won over the telecom world there were a lot of weird standards that looked like they would be adopted - ATM anyone?) edit: Apparently T1 started being carried over HDSL which is probably what was being used here https://www.arcelect.com/HDSL3698.htm https://www.arcelect.com/HDSL3698.htm

bombcar 3y ago

I knew a few who got a T1 line "installed to (their) house" as the song goes. There was a quite spicy time very early on where many things seemed potentially reasonable (ISDN, T1, etc) before DSL and DOCSIS took over everything.

grishka 3y ago
It's interesting to see how differently it all worked out in the US. I've never seen or heard about T1, I personally went from dial-up straight to Ethernet. Some people used to use ADSL. DOCSIS is also still a thing, but it's being replaced with better technologies (the slow uplink is meh).
- bombcar 3y ago
  For awhile "poor man's ISDN" was a thing with some local ISPs - you'd get something on your end that could shotgun multiple 56k modems, and they'd be able to bond them together.
wmf 3y ago
Wasn't a T1 around $1,500 per month in 1995? Imagine using such expensive service to deliver... TV.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The one I knew the price of was about $450 a month (maybe in 98?) but that was because there was some local completion and ISPs as such already existed vs ISPs using the local telco monopoly.

classichasclass 3y ago

(author) I had a residential T1 line for many years, and a friend of mine had one even earlier when most of us were still on dialup. It was certainly as possible as anything else was at the time.

xp84 3y ago

I’m more shocked at the notion of the T1, HDSL or whatever being run all the way to this STB. Imagine 1.5Mbps of bandwidth straight to your house and only being able to use it with this one limited device! But of course, the Web and lots of other goodies normal people might want to do online were not even close to mature yet. So this could plausibly be your only network-connected device. Wild.

wmf 3y ago
Yes, the interactive TV stuff in the 1990s was kind of a bet against the Internet. It's amazing to me that multiple companies developed entire systems that were 10x-100x too expensive to bring to market; I guess they hadn't heard that too early is the same as wrong.
qingcharles 3y ago
And in 1995 the total Internet bandwidth between the UK and the USA was basically a T1 IIRC.