In the late 90s a T1 cost about US$1,500/month. It came with a bunch of service guarantees and the like because it was aimed squarely at businesses. A T1 is only 1.5mbps too, fast for the time but in absolute terms not that great. The only other options were 56k modem (48kbps on a good day) and frame relay or ISDN, which was a solid 64kbps and lower latency than a modem but also far more expensive than it should have been (US$200-300/month).

Or you were in university/connected to a university.

The Swedish qwctf scene at least was very clearly divided in 20ms people who went to or worked at, a university, and 150ms people who played from home.

There were some 50-60ms ISDN people too but I can only remember a few.

The office of one of my early programming jobs had an ISDN line. I would carry my home desktop into the office to download things/play games.

The next job I had was in a much bigger company, and the office I was in had equivalent of 70+ T1s. Most of those were to support the phone system though.