Many of the early ISPs, notably AOL, weren't ready to offer unlimited access in the mid-90s. This state of affairs persisted until an unexpected rule-breaker appeared: AT&T.
Recently, in the context of the Internet, its "bottlenecks" have been actively discussed. Obviously it makes perfect sense from a 12 year old cable modem. So far, despite repeated doubts on the part of officials and society, during the COVID-19 epidemic. However, the real problem is access. Rural areas are notorious for terrible internet access, users have to deal with low speed DSL or due to non-execution of legislation that did not fill this gap in time. But today I would like to go back a little and discuss a period of time when the Internet experienced problems from providers. In this article, we will talk about the difficulties that the Internet faced when dial-up access (dialup) first gained wide popularity. "Keep dialing, sooner or later you will be able to connect."
Let's think about this ad: a man comes to a friend's house to see if he's ready to go to a baseball game, but what he's really saying is that he can't go himself. Why did he even come? This ad is based on a logical fallacy.
The Day AOL Opened the Gateways of the Internet
Users of the real Internet have long been suspicious of America Online because of the model it created. It wasn't the "real" Internet - the company didn't force users to use or terminal; she provided a friendly interface, in return leaving control over herself. Given the culture of tech-savvy that created the Internet, this model was an easy target.
Decades from now, major social networks will become very similar to AOL, but the providers will be completely different. And a lot of that is due to a pivotal decision made by AOL on December 1, 1996. That day, the company first offered unlimited access to its service for a flat fee.
Previously, the company offered various rates, the most popular of which was 20 hours per month and $3 for each additional hour.
A month before the new rate was introduced, AOL announced that by paying $19,99 a month, people could stay online for as long as they wanted. In addition, the company will improve access technology so that users can work through a regular web browser rather than the service's built-in web browser. How columnist Chicago Tribune James Coates, this change will also add support for Windows 95, making the company "become a full-featured 32-bit ISP with a flat $20 per month subscription." (Users could finally get rid of the horror of using Windows 95 web surfing programs designed for Windows 3.1!)
But this decision has turned into a pendulum that swings in both directions. For several months after the introduction of the tariff, it was almost impossible to get access to the AOL network - the lines remained constantly busy. Some people have tried to solve the problem by buying a separate telephone line so that it is constantly busy and they do not have to dial again. Repeated dialing was torture. The user was next to the vast digital sea, but it was necessary to get through to him.
To make matters worse, in the mid-1990s, AOL distributed a huge pile of discs to users. (Photo: )
Less noticeable at the time was how significant this change was to AOL's business model. In one fell swoop, the world's largest ISP opened up the entire Internet and moved away from the "carrot" business model that most online services then adhered to.
Up to this point, online services like AOL, along with its predecessors like и , had pricing models based on the volume of services used; over time they became lessrather than the more expensive ones. Notably, companies have inherited their pricing strategy from bulletin boards and digital access platforms, such as who charged above monthly payment also hourly. This model is not particularly consumer-friendly, and it put a barrier to the enticing level of Internet accessibility that we have now.
Of course, there were other bottlenecks. Modems were slow on both sides of the equation—in the mid-1990s, 2400 and 9600 baud modems remained the most common, and speeds were artificially limited by the quality of connections on the other side of the line. Suppose you had a 28,8 kilobit modem, but if the online provider could provide no more than 9600 baud, then you are out of luck.
Probably the biggest barrier to constant access was the business model. The early ISPs simply didn't know if it made sense to give us more Internet access, or if a business model without hourly rates would pay off. They also had infrastructure issues: if you offer everyone unlimited Internet, then you better have the infrastructure sufficient to handle all these calls.
In his 2016 book Shane Greenstein explains why Internet access prices have been a major issue. No one knew exactly what would be the winning argument for the Internet age. Here is how Greenstein describes the two philosophical camps of the provider world:
Two points of view have emerged. One of them paid a lot of attention to user complaints about loss of control. Users noticed that surfing the World Wide Web was hypnotizing. It was difficult for users to keep track of time while online. In addition, it was almost impossible to keep track of the time spent online if there were several users in the same house. Providers sympathetic to such user complaints felt that unlimited usage for a fixed monthly fee was an acceptable solution. The price increase will cover the additional costs of unlimited access, but the question of the size of this increase remained open. Such tariff plans are usually called "with a fixed payment" (flat rate) or "unlimited" (unlimited).
The opposite point of view contrasted with the first. In particular, it was believed that user complaints were temporary, and new users needed to be "trained" to keep track of their own time. Supporters of this view cited cell phones and bulletin boards as examples. At the same time, cellular telephony began to develop, and per-minute billing did not scare users away from it. One enterprising bulletin board (BBS) firm, AOL, seems to have even grown with this billing. Providers who held this view expressed their confidence that pay-per-service would win and called for the exploration of new combinations that would better fit the familiar surfing pattern of technically inexperienced users.
This led to a rather unfortunate state of affairs, and it was not entirely clear which of the models would provide more benefits. The side that cut this Gordian knot changed everything. Ironically, it was AT&T.
One of the old advertisements for AT&T WorldNet, the first ISP to offer flat rate unlimited access. (Taken from )
How AT&T turned unlimited access into the de facto standard for the mainstream Internet
Those familiar with the history of AT&T know that this company has not usually been the one to break down barriers.
Rather, it tended to maintain the status quo. It is enough just to know about the history of the TTY system, , seeking to find a way to communicate with friends, essentially invented an acoustic transducer (a gadget in which you can literally put your phone on a microphone and speaker) to get around the "Mama Bell" restriction that prevented third-party devices from connecting to her phone lines.
But in early 1996, when AT&T launched the WorldNet service, a lot had changed. The RJ11 phone jack, which was used in virtually all modems in the early 1990s, was the result of a court order that prohibited AT&T from restricting the use of third-party peripherals. Thanks to this, we have answering machines, cordless phones and ... modems.
By 1996, the company found itself in the odd position of breaking the rules of the then-young Internet industry. It was large enough that people who had never used ISPs finally decided to try them, and thanks to the choice of a flat payment, the company was able to attract active users - $ 19,95 for unlimited access if you had a connection to the company's long distance service, and $24,95 if it wasn't there. To make the offer more attractive, Internet access per month during the first year of use. (It is also notable that it offered speeds of 28,8 kilobits - quite high for those days.)
The problem, according to Greenstein, was the bet on scale. With such a low price for Internet access, the company was essentially hoping to connect tens of millions of people to the WorldNet - and if it could not guarantee it, then nothing would come of it. "AT&T took calculated risks by choosing to create a service model that could not be profitable if not widely used in many US cities."
AT&T wasn't the first flat-rate company—I personally used an ISP that offered unlimited dial-up access back in 1994. I had to use it because my over-enthusiasm for long-distance BBS calls ended up showing up on my parents' phone bills. But AT&T was so big that it could handle launching a nationwide flat-fee Internet service provider that its smaller regional competitor couldn't handle.
Article it is said that at some point AT&T wanted to build its own "walled garden" like AOL or Microsoft did with their MSN. But around 1995, the company decided to just give people a pipe to the Internet using open standards.
Markoff wrote: “If AT&T builds an attractive and inexpensive portal to the Internet, will customers follow? And if they follow, will something remain unchanged in the communications industry?”
Of course, the answer to the second question was negative. But not only thanks to AT&T, although it got a huge number of users by choosing to charge a flat fee for unlimited Internet. In fact, this industry has forever changed reaction to AT&T's entry into a market that set a new standard for Internet access.
The bar of expectations has risen. Now, to keep up, every ISP in the country had to offer unlimited access services to match the price of WorldNet.
As Greenstein notes in , it had a devastating impact on the still-young Internet service industry, with AOL and MSN becoming the only services big enough to charge that price. (Remarkably, CompuServe responded at the same fixed price of $19,95 as WorldNet.) But AT&T A: About a decade ago, the FCC passed a decision that allowed the company's data lines to not comply with the pricing rules applied to local voice calls.
AOL, which had a big business in the content that existed in its own system, initially tried to play both sides, his service running on top of an AT&T connection.
But soon she had to come to terms with the new standard - the requirement of a fixed payment for dial-up Internet access. However, this decision brought a whole bunch of problems.
60.3%
This was AOL's call rejection rate according to conducted by Inverse, an Internet analysis firm. This value was almost twice that of the second company on the list of similar losers, and most likely the result of poor optimization of the network of dial-up equipment. By comparison, CompuServe (which ranked top in the study) had a failure rate of 6,5 percent.
A 28,8 kilobit modem highly valued by home Internet users in the mid-1990s. ()
Taming Busy Signals: Why Going Online Was Such a Nightmare in 1997
One question I've been hearing a lot over the past few weeks is can the Internet handle the increased load? The same question was asked in early 1997, when more and more people began to spend hours online.
It turned out that the answer was no, and not because the increased interest made it difficult to access websites. It was more difficult to get access to telephone lines.
(Selected websites were stress tested due to the unfortunate events of September 11, 2001, because of interest in important news, and also because of the destruction of a significant part of the infrastructure of one of the largest cities in the world.)
AOL's infrastructure, already under stress due to the service's popularity, was simply not designed to handle the extra load. In January 1997, less than a month after the unlimited access was granted, the company began to be pressured by lawyers from all over the country. AOL has been forced to promise customers refunds and limit advertising until it can fix the infrastructure problem.
On , AOL approximately doubled the number of modems available to subscribers, but for anyone who used the telephone system to access a data service and received a busy signal, it was obvious that the problem was more serious: the telephone system was not designed for this, and it became quite clear .
Article Sun it was said that the structure of the telephone network was not designed for the use of lines in the 24/7 mode that dial-up modems were incentivized to do. And such a load on the telephone network led the "Bell kids" to try (unsuccessfully) to introduce an additional fee for the use. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was not happy with this, so the only real solution to this congestion would be a new technology that would take over these phone lines, which eventually happened.
“We use conventional telephone networks because they already exist,” wrote author Michael J. Horowitz. "They are slow and unreliable in data transfer, and there is no compelling reason why the needs of Internet users should conflict with those of voice calls."
This meant that for at least a few years we were forced to use a completely unstable system that negatively affected not only AOL users, but everyone else. It is not known if the user of AOL or another service was Todd Rundgren, who wrote the infamous song about the anger and annoyance of a person who cannot connect to an ISP: "".
ISPs have been trying to invent alternative business models to incentivize users to use the Internet less often, Greenstein said, by trying to charge less or by encouraging particularly aggressive users to choose another service by refusing to provide unlimited access. However, after opening Pandora's box, it was obvious that unlimited access had already become the standard.
“Once the market as a whole moved to this model, providers could not find a large number of fans of its alternatives,” writes Greenstein. "The forces of competition focused on user preferences - unlimited access."
AT&T's WorldNet was also not immune to the problems caused by its unlimited Internet service. By March 1998, just two years after the service launched, for each hour used in excess of the monthly 150 hours. 150 hours is still a pretty reasonable number, with about five hours per day. They can be spent if instead of viewing "Friends" you will spend all your evenings on the Internet, but it is definitely less than the promises of "unlimited" Internet.
As for AOL, it seems to have come up with the best solution in this inconvenient competitive situation: spending hundreds of millions of dollars to update its architecture, , effectively doubling their dial-up services in one fell swoop. According to Greenstein, around the same time, the company sold its dial-up equipment and gave it to contractors to make busy signals someone else's problem.
If you think about it, the solution was almost ingenious.
Today it seems obviousthat we were doomed to somehow get unlimited access to the Internet.
After all, it can be imagined that college students who had T1 lines in their dorms were extremely frustrated with technology off-campus. The inequality was so obvious that it could by no means last forever. To be productive members of society, we need unlimited access to these wires.
(Mark my words: it's likely that a good number of people who went to college in the 90s and early 2000s extended their stay in educational institutions only because they needed access to a then-rare high-speed Internet. Get a second degree With joy, as long as the download speed is good!)
The internet in the dorms must have been amazing, but dial-up modems obviously couldn't provide those speeds at home. However, the shortcomings of dial-up access have led to the development of better technologies over time; DSL (which used existing telephone lines for high-speed data transmission) and cable Internet (which used lines that were connected to ) have helped most users get closer to Internet speeds that were once only achievable on college campuses.
While writing this article, I wondered what the world would look like if an infection like COVID-19 appeared when we mostly went online via dialup, because such diseases seem to appear once in a hundred years. Would it be as convenient for us to work remotely as it is today? Would busy signals interfere with the development of the economy? If AOL were hiding dial-up numbers from their users, as they suspected, wouldn't that lead to riots?
Would we be able to order goods at home at all?
I don't have the answers to these questions, but I know that in terms of the Internet, in terms of connectivity, if we had to stay at home, today is the best time to do it.
I can’t imagine what would have happened if the “busy” signal had been added to all the pressure that we have to feel now in quarantine.
Source: habr.com