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The Story of the First Paralysis of the Internet: The Curse of the Busy Signal

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Many of the first Internet providers, in particular AOL, were not ready to offer unlimited access in the mid-90s. This state persisted until an unexpected rule-breaker appeared: AT&T.

Recently, in the context of the Internet, its bottlenecks have been actively discussed. Obviously, this is quite logical, because everyone is sitting at home now, trying to connect to Zoom from a 12-year-old cable modem. So far, despite repeated doubts from officials and society, the Internet is doing pretty well in the context of the COVID-19 epidemic. However, the real problem is access. Rural areas are notorious for terrible internet access, users have to deal with low-speed DSL or satellite accessdue to failure to comply with legislation that failed to fill this gap on time. But today I would like to go back a bit and discuss the period of time when the Internet was experiencing problems from providers. In this article, we will talk about the difficulties that the Internet faced when the first time dial-up access became widespread. "Continue dialing, sooner or later you will be able to connect."


Let's think about this advertisement: one person comes home to a friend to find out if he is ready to go to baseball, but he actually admits that he himself cannot go. Why did he come at all? This ad is based on a logical mistake.

The day AOL opened Internet gateways


Real Internet users have long been suspicious of America Online because of its model. It was not a “real” Internet - the company did not force users to use something like Trumpet Winsock or a terminal to create a connection ; it provided a user-friendly interface, leaving control over itself in return. Given the culture of technical savvy that created the Internet, this model was an easy target.

Decades later, large social networks will become very similar to AOL, but providers will be completely different. And this is largely due to a pivotal decision made by AOL on December 1, 1996. That day, the company first offered unlimited access to its service for a fixed fee.

Previously, the company offered various tariffs, the most popular of which were 20 hours a month and $ 3 for each additional hour.

A month before the introduction of the new tariff, AOL announced that by paying $ 19.99 a month, people will be able to stay online as long as they want. In addition, the company will improve access technology so that users can work through a regular web browser, and not through the built-in web browser service. As the Chicago Tribune columnist noted thenJames Coates, this change will also add support for Windows 95, making the company "turn into a full-featured 32-bit Internet service provider with a fixed monthly fee of $ 20 per month." (Users could finally get rid of the horror of using Windows 95 web surfing software designed for Windows 3.1!)

But this decision turned into a pendulum that swings in both directions. For several months after the introduction of the tariff, access to the AOL network was almost impossible - the lines constantly remained busy. Some people tried to solve the problem by buying a separate telephone line so that it was constantly busy and they did not have to redial. Repeated dialing was torture. The user was next to the vast digital sea, but he had to get through to him.


To make matters worse, in the mid-1990s, AOL distributed a huge pile of disks to users. (Photo: monkerino / Flickr )

At that time, the fact that how significant this change became for the AOL business model remained less noticeable. In one fell swoop, the largest Internet provider in the world opened access to the entire Internet and moved away in its business model from the “carrot” scheme, which then followed the majority of online services.

Until now, online services such as AOL, along with its predecessors like CompuServe and Prodigy , had pricing models based on the volume of services used; over time, they became lessbut not more expensive. It is noteworthy that companies inherited a pricing strategy from electronic bulletin boards and digital access platforms, for example, from the Dow Jones online information service , which also charged hourly in addition to monthly payments. Such a model is not particularly consumer friendly, and it posed a barrier to the alluring level of Internet access that we have now.

Of course, there were other bottlenecks. Modems were slow on both sides of the equation - in the mid-1990s, the most common modems were 2400 and 9600 baud, and the speed was artificially limited by the quality of the connections on the other side of the line. Suppose you had a 28.8 kilobit modem, but if the online provider could provide no more than 9600 baud, then you were out of luck.

Perhaps the most important barrier to continued access was the business model. The first Internet providers simply did not know whether it makes sense to give us more access to the Internet, and whether the business model would be justified without an hourly fee. They also had infrastructure issues: if you offer everyone unlimited Internet, then it would be better for you to have the infrastructure sufficient to handle all these calls.

In his 2016 bookHow the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network Shane Greenstein explains why Internet access prices have been a serious issue. No one knew exactly what would be the winning argument for the Internet age. Here's how Greenstein describes the two philosophical camps of the provider world:

. . , World Wide Web . , . , , . , , , . , . « » (flat rate) «» (unlimited).

. , , , «» . . , . , , (bulletin board, BBS) — AOL, . , , , .

This led to a rather sad state of affairs, and it was not entirely clear which of the models would provide greater benefits. The party that cut this Gordian knot changed everything. Ironically, AT&T became her.


One of the oldest advertisements of AT&T WorldNet, the first Internet provider to offer unlimited access with a fixed payment. (Taken from Newspapers.com )

How AT&T has turned unlimited access into the de facto standard for the mainstream Internet


Those familiar with the history of AT&T know that this company was not usually the one to break down the barriers.

Rather, it tended to maintain the status quo. All you need to do is learn about the history of the TTY system, in which deaf hackers seeking to find a way to communicate with friends, in fact, invented an acoustic transducer (a gadget in which you can literally put your phone on a microphone and speaker) to circumvent the “Mama Bell” restriction , which did not allow third-party devices to connect to its telephone lines.

But in early 1996, when AT&T launched the WorldNet service, a lot has changed. The RJ11 telephone jack, which was used in almost all modems of the early 1990s, appeared as a result of a court order banning AT&T from restricting the use of third-party peripherals. Thanks to this, we have answering machines, cordless phones and ... modems.

By 1996, the company was in a strange position, becoming a violator of the rules of the then young Internet industry. It was large enough so that people who had never used the services of providers finally decided to try them, and thanks to the choice of a fixed payment, the company was able to attract active users - $ 19.95 for unlimited access, if you had connected the company long-distance communication service, and $ 24.95 if it was not there. To make the offer more attractive, the company offered users five free hours of Internet access per month for the first year of use. (It is also noteworthy that she offered speeds of 28.8 kilobits - pretty high at the time.)

The problem, according to Greenstein, was betting on scale. With such a low price for Internet access, the company was essentially hoping for tens of millions of people to connect to WorldNet - and if it could not guarantee it, then nothing would come of it. “AT&T took calculated risks by choosing to create a service model that could not be profitable if it were not used widely in many US cities.”

AT&T was not the first company with a fixed payment - I personally used the services of an Internet provider, which offered unlimited dialup access back in 1994. I had to use it, because my excessive enthusiasm for long-distance calls to BBS ultimately affected the phone bills of my parents. But AT&T was so large that it could cope with the launch of a nationwide fixed-fee Internet service provider that would not have pulled its smaller regional competitor.

In the article New York Times of the famous technical writer John Markoffit says that at some point AT&T wanted to build its own “fenced garden”, as AOL or Microsoft did with its MSN. But around 1995, the company decided to simply provide people with a pipe to the Internet using open standards.

Markoff wrote: “If AT&T builds an attractive and affordable Internet portal, will customers follow? And if they do, will something remain unchanged in the communications industry? ”

Of course, the answer to the second question was negative. But not only thanks to AT&T, although it received a huge number of users, deciding to charge a fixed fee for unlimited Internet. In fact, the industry has forever changed the reaction to AT&T entering the market, setting a new standard for Internet access.

The bar of expectations has risen. Now, in order to keep up, each provider in the country had to offer unlimited access services that were priced at WorldNet.

As Greenstein observes in his book , this has had a devastating effect on the still young Internet services industry: AOL and MSN are the only large enough services that can set that price. (It’s noteworthy that CompuServe responded by launching its Sprynet service for the same fixed price of $ 19.95 as WorldNet.) But AT&T even annoyed the “Bell Kids”: About a dozen years ago, the Federal Communications Commission made a decision that allowed the company's data lines not to comply with the pricing rules applicable to pay for local voice calls.

AOL, which had a large content business that existed in its own system, initially tried to play on both sides by offering a cheaper version of its service that worked on top of the AT&T connection.

But soon she also had to come to terms with the new standard - the requirement of a fixed payment for dial-up Internet access. However, such a solution brought a whole bunch of problems.

60.3%


That was AOL's call failure rate according to a 1997 spring study by Inverse, an Internet analytics firm. This value was almost twice as high as that of the second company from the list of such losers, and most likely was the result of poor optimization of the dial-up equipment network. For comparison: CompuServe's failure rate (which turned out to be the best company in the study) was 6.5 percent.


A 28.8 kilobit modem, highly valued by home Internet users in the mid-1990s. ( Les Orchard / Flickr )

Taming signals “busy”: why attempts to go online became such a nightmare in 1997


The last few weeks I often hear one question - can the Internet withstand the increased load? The same question was asked in early 1997, when more and more people started spending hours online.

It turned out that the answer was no, and not because of the increased interest it became difficult to access websites. It was harder to get access to telephone lines.

(Some websites were subjected to a stress test in connection with the sad events of September 11, 2001, when the Internet began to suffocate under stress due to interest in important news, as well as due to the destruction of a significant part of the infrastructure of one of the largest cities in the world.)

The AOL infrastructure, already already under stress due to the popularity of the service, simply was not designed for the additional load. In January 1997, less than a month after providing unlimited access, lawyers from all over the country began to exert pressure on the company. AOL was forced to promise customers a refund and limit the scope of advertising until it could fix the infrastructure problem.

According to The Baltimore Sun , AOL approximately doubled the number of modems available to subscribers, but for anyone who used the telephone system to access the data service and received a busy signal, it was obvious that the problem was more serious: the telephone system was not designed for that, and it became very clear.

In the articleSun said that the structure of the telephone network was not designed to use the lines 24/7, which was encouraged by dialup modems. And such a load on the telephone network made the "Bell Kids" try (unsuccessfully) to introduce an additional fee for use. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) did not like this, so the only real solution for this congestion would be a new technology that would capture these telephone lines, which eventually happened.

“We use regular telephone networks because they already exist,” wrote author Michael J. Horowitz. “They are slow and unreliable in data transmission, and there are no fatal reasons why the needs of Internet users should conflict with the interests of those making voice calls.”


This meant that for at least several years we had to use a completely unstable system, which negatively affected not only AOL users, but also everyone else. It is not known whether Todd Rundgren, a user of AOL or another service, wrote a notorious song about the anger and annoyance of a person who fails to connect to an Internet service provider: " I hate my damn provider ."

According to Greenstein, providers tried to invent alternative business models in order to stimulate users to connect to the Internet less often, trying to charge a lower fee or pushing especially aggressive users to choose another service by refusing to provide unlimited access. However, after opening the Pandora's box, it was obvious that unlimited access had already become a standard.

“As soon as the market as a whole switched to this model, providers could not find a large number of lovers of its alternatives,” Greenstein writes. "The forces of competition have focused on user preferences - unlimited access."

AT&T's WorldNet was also not immune to problems caused by unlimited Internet service. By March 1998, just two years after the launch of the service,the company said it would charge users 99 cents per hour for every hour used in excess of the monthly 150 hours. 150 hours is still a fairly reasonable number, for each day there are approximately five hours. They can be spent if, instead of watching Friends, you spend all your evenings on the Internet, but this is definitely less than the promise of an "unlimited" Internet.

As for AOL, it seems that it came to the best solution in this uncomfortable competitive situation: having spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade its architecture, the company bought CompuServe in 1997, in fact, in one fell swoop doubling the volume of their dial-up services. According to Greenstein, at about the same time, the company sold its dial-up equipment and handed it over to contractors so that busy signals became someone else's problem.

If you think about it, the decision was almost brilliant.

Today it seems obvious that we were doomed to somehow get unlimited access to the Internet.

In the end, one could imagine that college students with T1 lines in their dormitories were extremely disappointed with technology outside their campuses. The inequality was so pronounced that in no case could it persist forever. To be productive members of society, we need unlimited access through these wires.

(Remember my words: most likely, a decent number of people who went to colleges in the 90s and early 2000s extended their stay in educational institutions only because they needed access to the rare high-speed Internet at that time. Get a second specialty ? With joy, if only the download speed was good!)

Probably, the Internet in the hostels was amazing, but dial-up modems obviously could not provide such speeds at home. However, the disadvantages of dial-up access over time have led to the development of more advanced technologies; DSL (in which existing telephone lines were used for high-speed data transfer) and cable Internet (using lines, which also required time to connect) helped most users get closer to the internet speeds that were once only reachable on college campuses.

When writing this article, I thought: what would the world look like if an infection like COVID-19 appeared when we mostly went online on dialup, because it seems that such diseases appear once every hundred years. Would it work for us remotely as conveniently as today? Would the signals “busy” prevent the development of the economy? If AOL were hiding dial-up access numbers from its users, as they suspected, would it not lead to riots?

Could we even order home goods?

I have no answers to these questions, but I know that if we talk about the Internet, from the point of view of communication, if we had to sit at home, today is the best time for this.

I can’t imagine what would happen if the signal “busy” was added to the whole load that we have to feel now in quarantine.

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