3 ms·

If I remember correctly back then in the US local phone calls and also dial up wasn't charged per minute. What a heavenly place, we had to pay around 2$ per hou

by andix 3y ago

If I remember correctly back then in the US local phone calls and also dial up wasn't charged per minute. What a heavenly place, we had to pay around 2$ per hour, which added up a lot if you wanted to go online for 2 hours every day. Then in 2000 DSL started to be available. Not billed per minute anymore, but per megabyte. 1GB was included per month and then it was around 7ct per megabyte. So once again very expensive. And no, there were no alternative providers available back then.

Scoundreller 3y ago
My big bad national ISP used the same PPPoE authentication for dialup and DSL. So you could buy an unlimited dialup account and use those hours on DSL and chew through as much data as you wanted. Later on, some independent ISPs sold logins+passwords that you could use over the "Bell" DSL service and connect through them for unlim data. (I initially hated it when they switched their DSL service to PPPoE over whatever they had before, because the PPPoE overhead sucked up like 10-15% of your throughput... until I decided to run a little test...)
marcus0x62 3y ago
ISPs in the US initially used unmetered access to compete against legacy services like Compuserv that charged per-minute. It also helped that they didn't typically incur per-minute charges on their phone lines, and after 1997 or so, could buy heavily subsidized lines from startup competitive telephone companies (who in turn typically WERE collecting a per-minute charge when the end users called into those lines from the legacy local telephone company.) Once an ISP got big enough they could connect to the SS7 network and buy inter machine trunks. Those did have per-minute costs, and very high startup costs, but they were so cheap compared to even the subsidized T1/PRI prices it didn't really matter.

3 ms·

If I remember correctly back then in the US local phone calls and also dial up wasn't charged per minute. What a heavenly place, we had to pay around 2$ per hou

by andix 3y ago

Scoundreller 3y ago
My big bad national ISP used the same PPPoE authentication for dialup and DSL. So you could buy an unlimited dialup account and use those hours on DSL and chew through as much data as you wanted. Later on, some independent ISPs sold logins+passwords that you could use over the "Bell" DSL service and connect through them for unlim data. (I initially hated it when they switched their DSL service to PPPoE over whatever they had before, because the PPPoE overhead sucked up like 10-15% of your throughput... until I decided to run a little test...)
marcus0x62 3y ago
ISPs in the US initially used unmetered access to compete against legacy services like Compuserv that charged per-minute. It also helped that they didn't typically incur per-minute charges on their phone lines, and after 1997 or so, could buy heavily subsidized lines from startup competitive telephone companies (who in turn typically WERE collecting a per-minute charge when the end users called into those lines from the legacy local telephone company.) Once an ISP got big enough they could connect to the SS7 network and buy inter machine trunks. Those did have per-minute costs, and very high startup costs, but they were so cheap compared to even the subsidized T1/PRI prices it didn't really matter.