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

Wed Jan 29 00:22:16 UTC 2020

Carrying on with the “first Internet connection” thread:

I forget how I found out about Usenet and UUCP email (lost in the mosts of time).  I ran a store and forward dial-up link from South Africa to DDSW1 in Chicago (Hi Karl!  Thanks!).  I cobbled together a package with a DOS-based mail reader and a DOS port of UUCP that several people used to get their email (including a local medical research establishment and the local veterinary college).  Demand grew, along with a request to relay email to the UNHCR in Northen Mozambique, so I scraped some money together to import a horribly expensive Telebit modem.  I ended up being the regional non-academic email hub for Southern Africa.

Just prior to the 1994 election, I got together with a two friends (Alan Barret and Chris Pinkham) and founded the first ISP in sub-Saharan Africa.  We managed to get a 64k satellite link at a very good price (the satellite folk were busy being retrenched and we were prepared to sign a contract specifically requiring satellite service for 5 years, which gave them some job security).  We borrowed a Cisco router from DiData (Cisco agents), skirted other telco regulations to link regions.

One of our early customers was a group of students who wanted to start a small dial ISP nearby.  We gave them service, bootstrapping what became our biggest competitor, Internet Solutions (now part of DiData, who never did ask for their router back).  Our little ISP grew and grew, and eventually merged with our biggest client, was sold, sold again, and so on.  Last time I looked, it had become Verizon Africa.

	paul

> On Jan 28, 2020, at 6:40 PM, Forrest Christian (List Account) <lists at packetflux.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
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> -- 
> - Forrest