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> Ownership of the Australian internet was transferred to Telstra in 1995, as private consumers and small businesses began to move online. A bit of a weird thi

> Ownership of the Australian internet was transferred to Telstra in 1995, as private consumers and small businesses began to move online. A bit of a weird thing to write. Telstra never “owned” the Australian internet, actually they tried very hard to undermine it, with MSN - which most people forget/don’t know actually started life as a dialup walled garden. There was at least one hard working Aussie ISP that had their own international transit - Connect.com. Connect did ultimately drop their independent transit in favour of Telstra, but IIRC that was the end of them - lack of independent transit meant they were paying the same wholesale rate as everyone else. It was sad to see them fail. Some friends and I founded one of Australia’s very early regional ISPs, in Ballarat, and I’m quite proud that I personally gave quite a few people their first experience on the dialup internet. We ended up buying our own transit too, in fact we were the first Australian ISP to use satellite for backhaul, our transit was commissioned a few weeks before Optus. Connectivity was charged per byte downloaded, but uploaded was free. So we set up asymmetric routing where downloads came over satellite direct from the USA, while uploads went via Telstra. This dramatically reduced the cost of internet, at the expense of a small amount of latency, which nobody really noticed considering that it was mostly dialup and that terrestrial links were very oversubscribed. Telstra eventually got wise and started charging for total (up+down) but it was still cheaper to do it our way. I think it worked financially and practically (in terms of latency) until the first big cable was laid, Southern Cross. But by then I was out of the game.

ggm 3y ago
I was at labtam/access-1 and connect with a bunch of people across this time. Stressful at the time, better memories now. The deployment of the first squid caches and their ultimate effect on the bottom line was .. amazing. Wiring up country Qld towns was an eye opener for a city boy. People were literally crying, getting high speed local service delivery, having been on the end of a long-line ISDN service back to Brisbane instead of a local in-town feed.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  > Stressful at the time, better memories now Yeah - I look back at the crew I worked with and it was stressful, but ultimately we all cared deeply about what we were doing. I wish I could find something like that today. Access-1 brings back memories. They really had a huge opportunity but from our perspective they blew it. My memory is weak but IIRC we were desperate for bandwidth and A1 had a copper pair to the local library capable of delivering 2Mbps - which we were told was not actually terminated. We tried to get A1 to talk to us, they said talk to the library, the library refused to meet with us. It all fell apart not long after. The timeline is hazy now but I think this was a driver for our satellite business, and we ended up outlasting almost everyone - at least until the First Great Consolidation after Comindico hit town.
  - ggm 3y ago
    A1 built tails mostly at 64 and 2mbit to the first generation integrated modems. The backbone was otherwise built using Telecom Australia/Telstra's Metro Network product, which ran out of W.A. and was very unforgiving. Rackable modem product was complicated to run. The Cisco integrated device was nice, but it's s/w stack was immature (I also worked on this at connect IIRC) There were often boundary issues around who talked to whom, who was an ISP, who wanted to be, who was an intermediary. Having a pair into an MDF was the least of the problems sometimes, I went to some meetings (I'd rather forget) about peering (financial settlement) issues. Ideally yes, you'd just plug stuff in and go. In reality, that wasn't how business worked. Labtam had a /16 direct from IANA, (not through AUNIC) from their manufacturing days. Now, that would be worth $3.5m -At the time, it was a godsend but not enough. The company had been bought at a low point in Australian PCB manufacturing at a stock-sale floor price, by two "entrepreneurs" who may well have been good businessmen but didn't understand the Internet one bit. Maybe they understood it too well, I remember a screaming match at a pre-sales tech meetup where one of them floated heads-up 3D VRML shopping malls and when I said "not technically feasible yet" I was roundly pasted for being defeatist. I didn't last in that company long.
    - doctor_eval 3y ago
      Yeah, we were hopeful that we could benefit from the A1 backbone - it was funded by the government right? like a precursor to NBN - but we ended up going it alone. I won't talk about NBN, what a shitshow. The economics of the internet in Australia have already been terrible, and the government never seems to invest in the places where it could have the most impact. For some reason I can see the Labtam logo in my mind's eye, but I can't remember why I know it. We used a lot of JTEC gear in the olden days. Did they end up buying Labtam maybe? I have no idea any more!
FireBeyond 3y ago
> Telstra never “owned” the Australian internet Maybe not, but for a not insignificant period of time, before Connect showed up, they did own about the only international transit. I ended up in the early-mid 90s doing some work for a guy who I dropped when I realized he was basically doing some spam-pyramid double play, but had paid for space in a very nice datacenter, and I figured out when I downloaded Navigator 2.0 from the datacenter, for a few seconds I was using something like 5% of Australia's international bandwidth. > So we set up asymmetric routing where downloads came over satellite direct from the USA, while uploads went via Telstra. That sounds entirely familiar too. I did some work for Crown Casino where I learned that Telstra would set up links with you of any size, they didn't care, just charged you 19c/mb (fucking ouch), and Crown had 100mbps backup fiber in 1994.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  The company I worked at before I joined the ISP had an AARnet connection via the university, and maybe this was operated by Telstra? It was at this company that I downloaded and compiled Mosaic for X. By the time we started the ISP, which must have been 1994, I think Connect was up and running. Yeah bandwidth was expensive, for others reading this it was 19c (or whatever) per megabyte of wholesale data - not per megabit/second. So if you downloaded a 10MB file then the wholesale cost was $1.90. Almost everything in Australia was charged by volume rather than capacity back then. We started out charging $5/hour for dialup access - and we were super popular. Imagine that! Of course I had a PAPL (fixed line) to home, it was sweet. I guess I’ve been permanently connected to the internet for longer than almost anyone in Australia.
Scoundreller 3y ago
Curious what year this would have been? Cool to learn that satellite backhaul was viable. What did Telstra have/use as offshore transit before that first big cable?
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  It’s a long time ago now and I’m quite hazy on the details. Would have been the mid 90s. It must have been 1994-98, and probably we got the satellite link in 96? I don’t remember what Telstra used, I think maybe there was a cable going to Singapore? But I’m not at all certain about that.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    I want to say it was a T3 or similar (I know Australia used E*) of 45mbps, or might have been 155mbps.
    - doctor_eval 3y ago
      Almost certainly correct. We started with 56k async ISDN, then 64k and ultimately 2Mbps - all ISDN back to Melbourne (120km) which cost a literal fortune. Satellite (and squid!) changed the cost basis dramatically. Something that was unique at the time was that we couldn’t get ahead of our bandwidth growth. We’d order more Mbps, but by the time it was commissioned, we’d need more. All links from all providers were always saturated. It was years before we could talk about contention ratios, or offer uncontended bandwidth. It’s hard to explain just how hard it was to keep up with the compound growth of data use from, literally, zero. You couldn’t just log into a website and click the “up” button. It was all scarcity, logistics and engineering.
liamwire 3y ago
Thank you for sharing this. I was born in ‘95—hearing a firsthand account of the early internet in Australia from someone that helped to bring it here is truly special.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  It's so long ago that I have to remind myself that I was in the thick of it, in those early days! We ended up wholesaling our satellite service across the whole of the country - as far north as Orange, NSW, and as far west as Kalgoorlie, WA (maybe even further; it's a long time ago). Each ISP would have a satellite ground station, which from memory was in most cases a 2m dish in a cage out the back, or on the roof. It always made the ISP offices look impressive! I was on the software side; mostly authentication & billing, stuff we had to write ourselves because noone else was doing it at the time. If you want to understand how it felt, the current wave of generative AI systems feels a lot like those pioneering dialup days. Like the internet, that stuff looks like it's going to change the world - both more slowly than we expect, at first, and then more completely than we can imagine today. It's unbelievable to me that we have high speed internet in our pockets, when I used to dream of having a 1Mb wired connection to my computer.

ggm 3y ago

I was at labtam/access-1 and connect with a bunch of people across this time. Stressful at the time, better memories now. The deployment of the first squid caches and their ultimate effect on the bottom line was .. amazing. Wiring up country Qld towns was an eye opener for a city boy. People were literally crying, getting high speed local service delivery, having been on the end of a long-line ISDN service back to Brisbane instead of a local in-town feed.

doctor_eval 3y ago
> Stressful at the time, better memories now Yeah - I look back at the crew I worked with and it was stressful, but ultimately we all cared deeply about what we were doing. I wish I could find something like that today. Access-1 brings back memories. They really had a huge opportunity but from our perspective they blew it. My memory is weak but IIRC we were desperate for bandwidth and A1 had a copper pair to the local library capable of delivering 2Mbps - which we were told was not actually terminated. We tried to get A1 to talk to us, they said talk to the library, the library refused to meet with us. It all fell apart not long after. The timeline is hazy now but I think this was a driver for our satellite business, and we ended up outlasting almost everyone - at least until the First Great Consolidation after Comindico hit town.
- ggm 3y ago
  A1 built tails mostly at 64 and 2mbit to the first generation integrated modems. The backbone was otherwise built using Telecom Australia/Telstra's Metro Network product, which ran out of W.A. and was very unforgiving. Rackable modem product was complicated to run. The Cisco integrated device was nice, but it's s/w stack was immature (I also worked on this at connect IIRC) There were often boundary issues around who talked to whom, who was an ISP, who wanted to be, who was an intermediary. Having a pair into an MDF was the least of the problems sometimes, I went to some meetings (I'd rather forget) about peering (financial settlement) issues. Ideally yes, you'd just plug stuff in and go. In reality, that wasn't how business worked. Labtam had a /16 direct from IANA, (not through AUNIC) from their manufacturing days. Now, that would be worth $3.5m -At the time, it was a godsend but not enough. The company had been bought at a low point in Australian PCB manufacturing at a stock-sale floor price, by two "entrepreneurs" who may well have been good businessmen but didn't understand the Internet one bit. Maybe they understood it too well, I remember a screaming match at a pre-sales tech meetup where one of them floated heads-up 3D VRML shopping malls and when I said "not technically feasible yet" I was roundly pasted for being defeatist. I didn't last in that company long.
  - doctor_eval 3y ago
    Yeah, we were hopeful that we could benefit from the A1 backbone - it was funded by the government right? like a precursor to NBN - but we ended up going it alone. I won't talk about NBN, what a shitshow. The economics of the internet in Australia have already been terrible, and the government never seems to invest in the places where it could have the most impact. For some reason I can see the Labtam logo in my mind's eye, but I can't remember why I know it. We used a lot of JTEC gear in the olden days. Did they end up buying Labtam maybe? I have no idea any more!

FireBeyond 3y ago

> Telstra never “owned” the Australian internet Maybe not, but for a not insignificant period of time, before Connect showed up, they did own about the only international transit. I ended up in the early-mid 90s doing some work for a guy who I dropped when I realized he was basically doing some spam-pyramid double play, but had paid for space in a very nice datacenter, and I figured out when I downloaded Navigator 2.0 from the datacenter, for a few seconds I was using something like 5% of Australia's international bandwidth. > So we set up asymmetric routing where downloads came over satellite direct from the USA, while uploads went via Telstra. That sounds entirely familiar too. I did some work for Crown Casino where I learned that Telstra would set up links with you of any size, they didn't care, just charged you 19c/mb (fucking ouch), and Crown had 100mbps backup fiber in 1994.

doctor_eval 3y ago
The company I worked at before I joined the ISP had an AARnet connection via the university, and maybe this was operated by Telstra? It was at this company that I downloaded and compiled Mosaic for X. By the time we started the ISP, which must have been 1994, I think Connect was up and running. Yeah bandwidth was expensive, for others reading this it was 19c (or whatever) per megabyte of wholesale data - not per megabit/second. So if you downloaded a 10MB file then the wholesale cost was $1.90. Almost everything in Australia was charged by volume rather than capacity back then. We started out charging $5/hour for dialup access - and we were super popular. Imagine that! Of course I had a PAPL (fixed line) to home, it was sweet. I guess I’ve been permanently connected to the internet for longer than almost anyone in Australia.

Scoundreller 3y ago

Curious what year this would have been? Cool to learn that satellite backhaul was viable. What did Telstra have/use as offshore transit before that first big cable?

doctor_eval 3y ago
It’s a long time ago now and I’m quite hazy on the details. Would have been the mid 90s. It must have been 1994-98, and probably we got the satellite link in 96? I don’t remember what Telstra used, I think maybe there was a cable going to Singapore? But I’m not at all certain about that.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  I want to say it was a T3 or similar (I know Australia used E*) of 45mbps, or might have been 155mbps.
  - doctor_eval 3y ago
    Almost certainly correct. We started with 56k async ISDN, then 64k and ultimately 2Mbps - all ISDN back to Melbourne (120km) which cost a literal fortune. Satellite (and squid!) changed the cost basis dramatically. Something that was unique at the time was that we couldn’t get ahead of our bandwidth growth. We’d order more Mbps, but by the time it was commissioned, we’d need more. All links from all providers were always saturated. It was years before we could talk about contention ratios, or offer uncontended bandwidth. It’s hard to explain just how hard it was to keep up with the compound growth of data use from, literally, zero. You couldn’t just log into a website and click the “up” button. It was all scarcity, logistics and engineering.

liamwire 3y ago

Thank you for sharing this. I was born in ‘95—hearing a firsthand account of the early internet in Australia from someone that helped to bring it here is truly special.

doctor_eval 3y ago
It's so long ago that I have to remind myself that I was in the thick of it, in those early days! We ended up wholesaling our satellite service across the whole of the country - as far north as Orange, NSW, and as far west as Kalgoorlie, WA (maybe even further; it's a long time ago). Each ISP would have a satellite ground station, which from memory was in most cases a 2m dish in a cage out the back, or on the roof. It always made the ISP offices look impressive! I was on the software side; mostly authentication & billing, stuff we had to write ourselves because noone else was doing it at the time. If you want to understand how it felt, the current wave of generative AI systems feels a lot like those pioneering dialup days. Like the internet, that stuff looks like it's going to change the world - both more slowly than we expect, at first, and then more completely than we can imagine today. It's unbelievable to me that we have high speed internet in our pockets, when I used to dream of having a 1Mb wired connection to my computer.