Australia for a long time was a worst-case major economy networking situation with few, slow, and high-latency links (and still suffers from high costs due to limited links and telco monopolies).
For an understanding of how limited international data links were as recently as the early 1990s, one of the key public data links between the US and Europe at the time was a 9660 baud link according to a dated, but fascinating, compendium of networking at the time (lost somewhere in the Krell stacks, I'll dig a reference on request).
Jon Bentley's classic Programming Pearls discusses the problem of transferring graphical data images between Mountain View and Santa Cruz, California, in the 1970s. The high-bandwidth, cost-effective, sufficiently reliable solution? Carrier pigeons. Really.