The PC and Internet Revolution in Rural America
changelog.complete.org
changelog.complete.org
I remember paying an obscene amount of money to access dialup Internet which was always a long distance call. I lobbied AT&T for an ISDN line and literally was laughed at by the tech who said it would be 25 years before they'd install it.
Two years later I got cable Internet at a whopping speed of 5 mb and it opened up the entire world to me. People in Lansing and Grand Rapids only had the option of buying their own T-1 if they wanted broadband at the time.
I tried to convince the city fathers of the small town I lived in to invest a little in an empty storefront and build out offices for startups with broadband as the lure. I told them they should exploit the small window that existed before everyone in the state had broadband. Sadly they looked at me like I was absolutely stark raving mad.
A few miles up the road, where the incumbent telco was a consortium of old independent "farm" telephone companies, was flat rate local dialup. Not for us, though. Eventually the independents offered local service in the large incumbent territory too (presumably when it became cost-effective to drop in a T1 and run a modem pool).
In that independent telco area xDSL became an option in the early 2000's. Fiber came shortly after.
In the large incumbent's territory none of that magical high speed stuff was an option until the local cable monopoly started offering service in 2004.
Even now if your wireline distance from the incumbent CO is too great and you live on a less-populous road (where it's not worth the cable company's cost to run cable) there are no wired high speed Internet options at all. (This is in the 25th most populous county of Ohio's 88 counties.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incumbent_local_exchange_carri...
In parts of rural western Canada it's very different, if you're in SK in you've got sasktel, if you're in AB you've got the former AGT (now Telus), if you're in BC you've got the former BCTel (also now Telus).
Comparing WA and BC, in WA there's pockets of small ILECs all over the place which differ wildly in how much they've invested in overbuilding their old POTS wiring for real rural broadband, and different medium to huge sized ILEC entities covering different big population centers. Ziply (former GTE/Frontier), Centurylink, etc.
In BC you've got... Telus. And that's it. And maybe shaw cable if you happen to live kind of near a medium sized city.
If I wanted to go down that route I'd probably try to set up a subdivision ISP.
If that doesn’t work, try calling for the business side of the business. But if there isn’t even fiber to the town you’re going to be looking at a huge cost.
But something else is happening now which is also interesting: rural broadband. As a result of actions taken by President Obama many years ago--according to my family at least--the area where I grew up will be getting broadband internet very soon.
This particular remote area will likely never get mapped on Google Street View, but people who live there will soon be able to watch netflix and do other things we often take for granted online.
Around here that means anything that’s not the literal main streets, and we’re not even far from the real world.
It's a travesty that there are some places that are not very rural at all in the US48 states where the best possible option is a starlink terminal right now. Something like starlink should be used for the REALLY remote and hard to reach places.
In addition to the hardware cost, which was extremely high (and being in the UK meant it was substantially higher than the US), but software costs were high too.
Before cheap subscription software, which is so bemoaned nowadays, all the software packages were 10x the cost, and still required repurchasing every year or two. Technically your older copy of Office, Photoshop, etc would still work fine, but you couldn't share documents with people with newer versions, as anything they saved you couldn't open. Those packages were hundreds of pounds each. Piracy was the only way as a teen to be able to actually get any software, I couldn't afford anything, even if I wanted to pay for it. A decent image editor can be had for $5 a month from the App Store now. Office is $10 for the whole family, and includes more storage than every drive I owned for the first 15 years I owned computers.
Even OS upgrades were all expensive. Even up until the early MacOS X versions it cost $129 a year for each version. Dropping it to $29 was a big deal for Snow Leopard, which was 2009.
And back in the late 90s/early 2000s download speeds were so bad that it was easier to pay for linux CDs too. I paid for the big boxed copies of SuSE 6.4 and 7, for example, just to get a good CD with all the packages on it.
Somewhere in that period I also remember when dial-up internet providers started to convert to providing free-phone 0800 (800 numbers in the US), if you paid for an account, and convincing my parents to pay for it, so that we wouldn't be billed by the minute any more. Before that a lot of providers just had toll numbers, so there was no monthly bill, we paid through the phone-line.
Finally I got ADSL in college, and at 8Mbps it was the fastest available in the UK from a tiny, niche ISP, which was effectively a pyramid scheme trying to get enough business through very under-cost, but high speed internet. They went bust after a couple of years, but it was amazing to move from dial-up to >1Mbps speeds.
At one point, I set up UUCP on a Kaypro 10 CP/M box with a built-in 300 bps modem and exchanged email that way for a few months. It was the only way to get Internet, even in the Seattle area, back in those years.
The key to connectivity on Novell networks was their groupware product, GroupWise. The law firm I worked for had three offices, and for several years we used it to exchange interoffice email powered by a gang of modems (starting at 1200bps and eventually topping out at 9600 before we decided we could make use of a T1). The main office would connect with the branches once an hour. It was life-changing for us in the early 90s.
Nice to see Watcom C++ mentioned in there. Was far and away my fave in the 90s.
there were some large cities and metro areas such as the seattle calling area which had a HUGE number of BBSes at one point in time, prior to the popularity of the initial dialup ISPs around 1993-1994, because the local calling area was huge.
conversely, if you happened to live in a small town in rural america you'd be paying long distance rates, or maybe waiting until after 10pm for better long distance rates, to call any BBSes.
the market feasibility of the first dialup based ISPs in the era when a 28.8 modem was HIGH SPEED was also very much dependent on the possible customer base in the no-charge local calling area.