Hacker News Reader

Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

I remember visiting relatives in Switzerland in the 90s and it was the first time I’d seen ISDN - felt like they were living in the future while we were still on dialup in the US. I was thinking earlier today how when I was that age how amazing it would be to have fiber someday - has taken 25 years but I finally have it at home, and it still isn’t fast or reliable enough

View on HN

ISDN was widely available in the US (it ran on the same copper pairs you already had) but was never all that popular. You could essentially _always_ get it deployed and it was the base-level connectivity back in the 90s for remote sites. I had it installed in a few crappy apartments much to the confusion of the local installers, the line price wasn't crazy expensive but finding a local ISP that would agree to reasonable always-on pricing was more challenging.

Then we had two very different lived experiences - my parents couldn’t get it in the Seattle area, I couldn’t get it where I was going to college in the midwest, and what I recall was that it was very expensive, like double the cost or more, or any available dial-up option.

In the Southeast, you could get it but it took some more or less annoying negotiating with Bellsouth bureaucracy, usually had install issues because the residential installers didn't do it that often, and it was way more than double the cost of dialup. There were plenty of ISPs.

This was similar to my experience in SE Michigan & NW Ohio in the late '90s to early '00s. Ameritech required you to order 2 ISDN phone lines, which cost somewhere around $80 per month, each. ISPs charged extra for the ISDN services, too.

The future we wish for is often subpar in reality. Thanks monopolies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com