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Comment by russh | Hacker News Reader

Extremely overpriced in my area.

This was my experience too. I was looking for something better than the 56k modem, but ISDN was 10 times as expensive and like 20% faster.

In the end I was stuck on modem until DSL finally rolled out in my area. One thing I miss about DSL was that it was open. You had your choice of several competing ISPs that offered service over the same lines. You could get some very nice fast service with lots of features for cheap. Locally run Usenet servers. Free web hosting. Free terminal server. Free Email. Static IP addresses. All the stuff that the monopolies don't offer anymore.

Fwiw open access fiber systems have that now. In Utah you can actually subscribe to multiple ISPs over Utopia fiber, and it's mostly just an issue of configuring your terminal to talk to them.

Since it's a 100% eithernet network, any off the shelf device with an SFP cage can connect to it

That would be nice. My local fiber option is Verizon or nothing. Verizon's tech works very well, but their customer service is terrible. Many people think that Verizon only pushed FiOS as hard as they did because it gave them a way to push out the competitors they had on DSL. Once DSL died off so did their drive to deploy FiOS.

Extremely affordable in my area at the time, due to massive subsidies from the former government telco, to push it to the masses.

Also the only solution from private telcos at around the same time, where said former gov telco simply wouldn't offer early DSL at all, while private upstart offered ISDN whith dynamic channel bundling at flat rated 29,99 per month, so 128Kbs! Yay!

Since it was pushed so hard by subsidies, many had it, the equipment was cheap, and the sound quality that came with it was rather good. Often still unmatched by some crap which people accept as 'normal' nowadays.

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