1999 vs. 2009 – The ISP

In a few short months it’s going to be 2009, and a ton of stuff has changed in the world of computing over the past almost-ten years. Some of the modern advancements have proven to be a notable improvement while others still produce the same crapola they did nearly ten years ago.

In this installment we’ll be taking a look at something you’re using right now – the ISP. Where did it originate from and who really holds the “keys” to internet connectivity as we know it? You’ll find all this out in this article.

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Anything that gets big over time always starts out small. A classic example of this is the Internet Service Provider, commonly referred to as the ISP.

Bear in mind that the ISP always starts (and usually ends) at the electric company. This may leave you scratching your head thinking, “How can the electric company be the beginning and end of all internet connectivity as we know it?”

Here’s how it all works:

The telecommunications company (i.e. the phone company) is the one that has the data connectivity, and they want to be able to bring that to its customers. The only way in which to do this is by terrestrial means (meaning by land).

What is commonly referred to as a “phone pole” is actually (usually) owned by the utilities company (i.e. the electric company). The telecommunications company rents or leases space on the utilities company’s poles, installs wires that then lead to your house providing you the internet connection you purchased.

The next question people ask is “Why does the phone company have the data connectivity and not someone else?” The answer is that the phone company is the only business entity that had (and still does) an infrastructure in place that could be adopted for data connectivity accessible to just about everyone. They are the ones who already had the wires in place.

The question that people ask after this is “But I get my internet connection from my cable company. How is the phone/electric company involved there?” Yes, you may get your connection from the cable company. But they acquire their internet connectivity from the phone company, who rents space on the poles from the electric company.

No matter how you look at it, everything starts at the poles. And those who own the poles rule the roost. It’s always been this way and most likely always will. And even when long-range wireless connectivity is introduced (this will most likely happen before 2015), that connectivity still starts terrestrially first before going wireless – and that goes right back to the utilities company yet again.

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In 1999 the vast majority of internet users were getting online using dial-up. Dial-up is where you physically connected a phone line directly to your computer’s modem and used software to instruct it to dial a phone number to connect to the internet.

Modem is a word made of two words, MOdulate and DEModulate. Computers obviously use digital means to send and retrieve information, however the phone line is analog. The modem modulates the analog signal, pushes its data over the wire and is then demodulated at the receiving modem. You can think of this as an encode/decode series of events.

It’s not required for you to know or understand the technical mechanics of how it works other than this method was used to overcome a limitation of what phone lines could do. Computers are digital; phone lines are analog. Instead of placing a bunch of new and prohibitively expensive digital hardware on the poles, the dial-up method was a very cheap inexpensive way to do the same job on a “base to base” method.

As a side note, much of our broadband connectivity is still achieved using this method. When you use a cablemodem, it is still a modem save for the fact it uses the cable television lines instead of phone lines. DSL modems connect to “repeater” points within the telecommunication company’s infrastructure called DSLAMs. If you have DSL you most likely know you have to generally be within 15,000 feet of the nearest DSLAM in order for successful internet connectivity to be achieved. A DSLAMs sole purpose for residential internet service is to extend the range of the network so more customers can connect.

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Prior to residential internet service (what you use), the only way to get online was via something called the BBS. The BBS was not internet but rather a direct peer-to-peer means of connecting to another computer.

Here’s how BBSing worked in a nutshell:

First, you bought a modem so you could attach your computer to a phone line.

Second, through word-of-mouth alone (usually) you would become of a BBS you could call in your LCA (local calling area). You had to stay local because the long-distance phone charges were absolutely outrageous at the time.

Third, you would get a copy of some terminal software. Remember, there’s no internet, so if you wanted some terminal dialer software to connect to the BBS, you had to get it from a friend on floppy disk.

Fourth, you install the software, punch in the local phone number of the BBS and dial out. If you didn’t get a busy signal (which happened often), you connected, created an account and logged in.

The BBS experience was usually limited to only what was on the computer you connected to. There were some local-only message boards, maybe a few “door” games, maybe some files and not much else.

Better BBSes had “netmail”; a means where several BBSes would “trade” message boards for interconnected messages across multiple systems.

When the internet started catching on like wildfire in the mid-to-late 1990s, the vast majority of ISPs were in fact former BBS system operators. Most of these ISPs were simply known as “Mom ‘n’ Pop” businesses because they were in fact run like one. The Mom ‘n’ Pop ISP had usually only one data “pipe” leased from the phone company to the internet and then used their existing modems to accept calls to the internet rather than the local BBS system.

As startling as this is to many, a typical scenario for the Mom ‘n’ Pop ISP is that most literally were run out of a garage or basement. We’re not talking about high-powered data centers staffed with ‘round-the-clock highly trained employees.

In addition, most local phone carriers (especially the smaller ones) that provided internet service more or less operated the same way in the early days. Instead of a basement they would stuff a bunch of cheap computers into a storage room, cool the computers off as best they could with a cheap air conditioning unit and say, “Yep. That’ll work.”

Here’s a true story of the crazy things ISP owners did years ago to save a buck:

A local ISP in New Hampshire had a bunch of external modems used to receive calls from customers but didn’t feel like upgrading the system to all internal because it would cost too much. So what he (yes, one guy) did is physically drilled holes in all the external modem casings and literally strung them together using twine, daisy-chain style. It was an absolutely ridiculous setup – but it worked and the customers were none the wiser as long as they could get on the internet.

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What’s reality now in present day compared to 1999 is both a good and bad story.

Several phone companies and large private enterprise corporations realized that internet was a really, really big thing and wanted to cash in on it as quick as possible. So what they did is started acquiring Mom ‘n’ Pop ISPs like crazy. If there was any local ISP – no matter how big or small – they would offer these businesses a rather large sum of cash because the bigger companies new it would all be paid back in less than two years. The local ISPs were all bedazzled by having money thrown at them by Big Corporate, and the vast majority of them cashed in their chips and went away much wealthier than they were.

For the local ISPs that didn’t sell out, they were absolutely squashed by the larger ones and quickly phased out as the big ISPs offered newer, better, faster – and moreover cheaper – internet connectivity plans.

The days of the local ISP are long gone, never to return.

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The ISP of today is much better than it once was for several reasons.

1. Speed

Several years ago the ratio of dial-up to broadband users shifted and now almost everybody is using broadband.

2. Reliability

ISPs today are housed in full-blown data centers, staffed with trained professionals instead of Ol’ Bob in his dank leaky basement.

3. Price

The cost of broadband connectivity broke $15 per month a few years ago so more or less everyone can get online for literally pennies a day.

The cheapest quality dial-up internet years ago was easily $18 to $30 a month.

4. Choice

In most markets you have the choice of at least three major ISPs for broadband connectivity, that being cable company, phone company and satellite.

Back then you either had the choice of the local sometimes-online ISP or the overpriced phone company. Both were pretty terrible.

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Some would argue that we were better off with the local ISPs because you could conduct business with someone you knew right down the street in your own neighborhood. I disagree with this because the local owner doesn’t put upgrading and maintaining his network or his servers as high priority – but the larger ISPs do in order to keep customers.

Internet today is a common in nearly every household in the United States and many parts of the rest of the world, and it’s required to have solid reliable internet connectivity.

The local ISP owner did play an important role in getting people online, but to go back to that means of getting to the internet would be a mistake in today’s world.