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> 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 in

> 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.