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The article addresses the big miscalculation by the telecoms, as I see it, though somewhat obliquely. In the telecom world, the telecom was the network. If you
by jmbwell 3y ago
The article addresses the big miscalculation by the telecoms, as I see it, though somewhat obliquely.
In the telecom world, the telecom was the network. If you wanted to exchange data with someone, you placed a call to someone directly. Everything was envisioned as some form of point to point session between subscribers. Whatever it was, it was one subscriber contacting another. The telecoms didn’t really conceive of what would become the Internet as we think of it now. As far as they were concerned, the Internet didn’t provide anything the telecoms couldn’t offer—and bill for.
They were caught flat footed when customers started dialing up ISPs and cutting the telecoms out of the loop. If you wanted Internet, you got ISDN, but you used it to call an ISP that was not the phone company.
Not that the telecoms weren’t visionary — they largely foresaw everything we do today. They just assumed they would continue to be the sole provider of those services. They built a network with that in mind.
And then we all went and built our own network on top of that.
They scrambled to try to charge us for using our voice lines for data, and then they managed to slide DSL onto the rate card, and ultimately became actual ISPs.
But that wasn’t the future ISDN was built for. It wasn’t built for a world where an ISP was even a thing. It was built for a world where everything we now do on The Internet would show up as a line item on a bill from AT&T.
- calamari4065 3y agoImagine if instead of resolving a name to an IP address, it resolved to a phone number. Loading any modern webpage would take a week of dialing to fetch all the ads and trackers.
- jowea 3y agoAt least there would be an integrated payment system that works for microtransactions. Maybe we wouldn't have had the adweb.
- rasz 3y agoTelcos actually realized that dream in cellular networks. Tons of scams followed with random webservers automagically charging your wireless plan for "services" https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/chunyi/pubs/ccs12-peng.pdf https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/chunyi/pubs/ccs12-peng.pdf
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> Imagine if instead of resolving a name to an IP address, it resolved to a phone number. Loading any modern webpage would take a week of dialing to fetch all the ads and trackers. FYI: - Minitel (France): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel This service was quite successful - Bildschirmtext (BTX, Germany): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext Less successful than Minitel in France, but also had its users
- bewo001 3y agoI worked at an ISDN adapter company in the late 1990s. Apparently, one customer a couple of years earlier did use ISDN as their LAN technology. Each PC with an adaptor (to the joy of my employer, this customer was not small), using the PBX as network switch. I have no idea what software they used. Probably some CAPI-based file transfer. The extended version of that, using ATM-based BISDN, was the telcos' vision of networking.