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Genuine question from a non US citizen, did breaking up a telecom in the USA lead to personal internet connections?
by pipes 2y ago
Genuine question from a non US citizen, did breaking up a telecom in the USA lead to personal internet connections?
- llm_trw 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler >Prior to its breakup in 1984, Bell System's legal monopoly over telephony in the United States allowed the company to impose strict rules on how consumers could access their network. Customers were prohibited from connecting equipment not made or sold by Bell to the network. The same set-up was operative in nearly all countries, where the telephone companies were nationally owned. In many households, telephones were hard-wired to wall terminals before connectors like RJ11 and BS 6312 became standardized.
- AStonesThrow 2y agoAhh, those halcyon days before opaque consumer routers with zero-days, botnets, and gray-market residential proxy services.
- llm_trw 2y agoAt 1200 baud, yes.
- dustyventure 2y agoYou make it sound a little like this isn't timing and ma bell would have developed securer edge nodes, but everything on their network sophisticated enough to attack was powned by bored children.
- simfree 2y agoInband signaling for the win! Having the overhead of a separate control channel was more expensive than just doing the signaling in band.
- AStonesThrow 2y agoSure, phreakers could attack the central office equipment, and get free calls, disrupt the network some, but they couldn't make some other customer's phone explode, or melt into slag, or ring 1,000,000 numbers at once, from 5,000 miles away.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- repeekad 2y agoI would imagine the break up of AT&T and the monopoly that formed around phone connections certainly inspired Americans working on the early algorithms of the internet. We still use telephone numbers today, even though mobile internet has made them fully obsolete
- llm_trw 2y agoYou would imagine wrong. The internet had settled just about all the major protocol decision by 1984 it was all about the hardware you could connect to the network.