hoopy froodmas. I just flew in from ireland, and boy are my arms tired.

Gesundheit!

And a Partridge Family in a Bear Tree!

Hi folks, just a reminder this site will be going down on Jan 1st 2014 at 00:30 UTC for maintenance. It should be back
up and running about a half hour later.
Thanks

Thankfully, that was over a year ago, when it was 2014. Although it seems the message warning us about this maintenance finally arrived.

300 members on a dialup system would have been pretty darned good, actually.

"Back in the day" (1993-2000) we had almost exclusively dialup customers. This was pre-DSL in southern NJ. That actually didn't happen until after we moved out here to CA in '01.

Our "home" area code (609) was divided into three LATAs, which meant the "toll call" situation was complex for people using out-dial. We obviously had to figure that one out.

First Solution:
Find a willing person in each LATA willing to host a modem bank in their house. We paid for all the hardware and phone-comany connections (8 lines on a "hunt group", a terminal server, and a dedicated connection to our machine room). Dedicated (leased) lines fell into a different tariff than voice lines, so the LATA thing, at least for south Jersey, was a non-issue. This worked fine, but as you can imagine, got "clunky" with increased usage. As we would say today, it did not scale upward.

Second Solution: Our Digital Lines contractor actually came up with this one - and it was a stroke of genius. Eventually it became the "ISP Model" - at least for New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania. We ordered four Primary Rate Interface (PRI) lines, one each for (a) Atlantic City to Cape May, (b) Brigantine/Seaside to Toms River, (c) Hammonton South, and (d) Trenton. The rest of the state was right where we were physically located, so we just kept our original 23-line hunt-group running in the machine room. THIS was THE way to do this since each of the PRI lines could handle 23 dialup lines with "digital presentation" required for the old-style 56K dialup modem protocol, and true digital connection in the machine room on our end. Worked like a raped ape (a Good Thing). And was a LOT cheaper than doing it the "First Solution" way.

At our peak we serviced roughly 800 dilaup customers. Almost never a busy signal. We strictly employed the "8 customers per dialin line" rule and except on that rare instance when "everybody on earth just *had* to be on teh net" it worked flawlessly.

Here was our fee structure:
DIALUP
$25/month. $70/quarter, $250/year (pay for 10 mo. and get 12).

And here is where we **really** made money:

DIGITAL (T-1)
Commercial Rate: $1,250/mo NOT including the telco local loop.
We had roughly 10 of those customers.
Yup. $12,500 per month just for plugging a 10meg ethernet cable from the router serving the customer to the Big Router hosting our bandwidth to the net.

$1,250/mo. for a T-1 (1,544 meg). Today you'd go to JAIL for that!
I have a friend paying his cable company $89.99/mo for 110 MB.
And he complains.
And I tell him "that is just a hair under THREE DS-3 CONNECTIONS!
"Back in the day" that would have cost you about 50 GRAND a month!
Shut up and pay the bill!!

How times have changed....

--Vince
Founder, NetK2NE

I'm sorry, but I just don't see how $89.99/month for 110 MB/sec is "getting screwed and ripped off."

It's all about "what the market will bear." And that's the way it should be. Thankfully, in most markets we have phone and cable companies keeping each other in check, which is why both are hesitant to break the $100 barrier for "triple play."

Some say that the new Title II rules will allow the government to decide the pricing of Internet, but I'm skeptical about that.

I remember in the early 1990's, dreaming that maybe someday I could afford the $300/month for a 56 Kbps connection to the Internet, so I could connect this BBS to the rest of the world.