Reminiscing our first internet connections (WAS) Re: akamai yesterday - what in the world was that

Tue Jan 28 23:40:21 UTC 2020

So to add my two stories:

I provided the Idea and a whole bunch of time/labor/etc to start a dialup
ISP in our hometown back in 1994.   I remember having a big debate on
whether to bring in a single 56K leased line or 128K fractional T1.  We
went with the Fractional T1 just because it could be easily expanded over
time.   (That T1 is now multiple 10GB circuits - yes the ISP is still
running and I still am involved).   So a single 128K fractional T1, a cisco
2501 (with external DSU, those internal cards didn't exist yet), and 8 14.4
modems attached to a single Sun Unix box.  Note that this was pre-web, and
back in the days where you pretty much knew at least generally everything
which was on the internet.

Things grew quickly, don't remember how many lines.   At some point we
moved to having 56K modems on our end, which required a digital carrier to
the central office.   T1's were very expensive, so we did a bit of
tariff arbitrage.   One could obtain a 'metered' ISDN BRI line for like
next to nothing - the metering had to do with the fact they were going to
charge you by the minute for any calls, but here's the catch:  for outgoing
calls only, incoming calls were free which worked great for a dialup ISP.
  The problem was that 56K dialin concentrators all wanted T1 lines.
What we discovered is that Adtran made a box which would take a whole bunch
of ISDN BRI (each with 2 channels), and combine them into a single T1.
 And due to the retail pricing difference for T1 vs BRI, we could pay for
the box in a few months.    So we took a whole truckload of ISDN BRI lines
and combined them into a few channelized T1's and ended up paying a lot
less to the phone company.

Of course, things have grown past that (we have an extensive WISP network
and have an ever-growing amount of fiber in the ground).  But it's fun to
think about where we started.

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 1:00 PM <bzs at theworld.com> wrote:

>
> On January 27, 2020 at 22:57 marka at isc.org (Mark Andrews) wrote:
>  > The hardware support was 2B+D but you could definitely just use a
> single B.   56k vs 64k depended on where you where is the world and which
> style of ISDN the telco offered.
>
> FWIW bulk dial-up lines were often brought in as PRIs which were 24
> ISDN 2B+D lines on basically a T1 (1.544mbps) and then you could break
> those out to serial lines.
>
> The sort of cool thing was that you could get caller information on
> those even if the caller thought they blocked it with *69 or whatever
> it was and log it. I forget the acronym...no no, that's the usual
> caller-id this was...ummmm, DNI? Something like that.
>
> I won a court case with that data.
>
> --
>         -Barry Shein
>
> Software Tool & Die    | bzs at TheWorld.com             |
> http://www.TheWorld.com
> Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD       | 800-THE-WRLD
> The World: Since 1989  | A Public Information Utility | *oo*
>

-- 
- Forrest
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