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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
by 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 agoI want to say it was a T3 or similar (I know Australia used E*) of 45mbps, or might have been 155mbps.
- doctor_eval 3y agoAlmost 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.