How 90's dial-up Internet worked, and let's make our own ISP.

How 90's dial-up Internet worked, and let's make our own ISP.

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we're gonna go back in time to the 1990s and  build ourselves a dial-up isp yes back before   broadband was a thing we weren't all permanently  connected to the internet we had to dial it up   which is basically we plugged one box into our  computer and it screamed down a telephone line   into another box so we're going to build ourselves  a dial-up system which is going to give me a nice   excuse to go over the technology in the history  of this thing now there's a particular reason i'm   doing this video now because this time next year  this video may not be possible as here in the uk   our major telecommunications company bt are about  to shut down the operation of pots phones by the   old-fashioned analog telephone lines that we all  used to have at home bt is going to start offering   voice over ip services only which to be honest  modems do not work very well under, as they are   designed to compress voice data really well but  that compression is lossy so modem signals tend   to get damaged and corrupt when they come back  out the other end of the compression algorithm so   i figured if we're gonna create a dial up ISP we  better do it while people can still you know dial   us up i should mention this video is sponsored by  pcb way i know right i'm as shocked as you are who   would have thought this little channel would be  sponsored but it is pcb way make unsurprisingly   pcbs and they also do 3d printing and cnc milling  as well basically you upload your designs and the   results come back in the post obviously you have  to pay them as well as this is the first time i've   ever had a sponsored video i feel like i should  point out this sponsorship isn't going to change   anything about the channel pcb way don't have any  control over what videos i make what the content   is what i say about anything that they're just  here to sponsor it so i mentioned pcb way man you   don't know how hard it is not to pronounce that  pcb way right back to our regular schedule now i'm   gonna go over some basic phone stuff because not  everyone was alive when dial-up isps were a thing   traditional telephone lines are designed to do  one thing and one thing alone and that's get   a voice call from one place to another place and  it did that essentially by doing something called   circuit switching it would essentially join a  number of lines together in a row to get you from   one phone to the other phone establishing  a circuit path between the two devices   your analog audio call would then essentially pass  along those lines as analog waveform now it did go   a little bit more complicated than that especially  as more users came onto the network and multiple   calls between exchanges started to share the same  copper line using frequency shifting techniques   phone lines don't carry the full spectrum of  human hearing after all we don't use that whole   frequency range for speech what became the settled  on standard was that it would represent from 300hz   to 3.5 kilohertz which is why phone calls sound a  little bit well different to normal human speech   in fact i'll just give you a quick clip of me  talking with that frequency limitation on us   hello hello hi this is a telephone yep that's  me talking with everything turned down from 300   hertz and below and everything after 3.5 kilohertz  and it's into this space that modem manufacturers   had to start operating modem stands for modulator  demodulator as that's basically what a modem does   it takes a binary stream of data and modulates  a sound wave to represent it it also listens   takes inbound soundwave and demodulates those back  into digital the first ever commercial modem was   released in 1958 and created by AT&T known as the  bell 101 which was very quickly replaced by the   bell 103 which boosted data rates from a whopping  110 bits a second to 300 bits a second man that   was not rapid the 103 remained essentially the  standard modem all the way through into the   late 70s and in fact pretty much all modems that  still exist now they can still do the 103 standard   bizarrely it's even still in use for shortwave  radio broadcasts yes it's still used by radio hams   today and there are even still commercial services  that broadcast the current time in that format   as well by the time we're into the beginning of  the 80s things are starting to change for modems   the first big thing that happens is Hayes releases  its smart modem now up until the smart mode and   when you use the modem you literally dialed the  number you are going to want with your phone   kind of like this you then take your phone and  you place it in a cradle so the modem could then   hear what's going on and it would just start  essentially having the 103s type conversation   if you happen to pull the handset out part  way through well data would drop and as soon   as you put the handset back again yeah data would  continue with no recovery of the data in between   the Hayse smart modem that allowed the computer to  actually control the modem and it introduced what   is now known as the AT command set to do this  so for example atdt would use tone dialing to   dial a particular number this also meant that your  Hayes compatible modem and can be plugged straight   into the telephone line you didn't need an actual  telephone on there that you did the dialing with   because the Hayes modem could ath for example hung  up the phone call ata answered an inbound phone   call ati told you a bunch of information about the  modem now this is how all modems now work as you   can still buy new modems now around the same  time the smart modem command set was becoming   quite popular modems were starting to offer  different speeds to just the 300 bits a second   standard from the 103 and the 1200 bits a second  standard AT&T had established slightly later on   but having different standards modems had to start  negotiating between each other after all they had   to agree which set of standards each modem could  support and then pick one between them to have   the conversation at now this led to the familiar  sound patterns all of those who use modems during   this period will recognize this beginning of the  conversation now you see it starts with what's   known as the carrier detectome that way you can  tell you're actually talking to a modem you can   also use that carry as a tech tone to work out has  the line dropped and then there are essentially a   bunch of training tones where the two modems  try to work out what speeds they support once   this training period is over our connection is  established and data can transmit between the two   devices the carrier tone keeps going all the way  through just so we can check if the line's dropped   or not now all of these faster speeds had to live  within that frequency restriction we were talking   about earlier the 300 to 3.5 kilohertz range so  this severely limits the amount of data a modem  

can possibly move now these techniques let us get  all the way up to 33.6 kilobits a second which is   close to what's known as the Shannon limit for the  line now you may have noticed all this development   in modems is starting to take place before  the internet at home is really a popular thing   and that's because they're being used well not  for the internet but to dial up other services for   example a fair few companies would allow people  to remotely dial into their networks or machines   individuals have also started setting up bulletin  board services so you can connect up to them even   have a period where computer companies start their  own dial-up services for example apple and you   start to get world garden services like compuserve  or aol or in the uk offerings like prestel or in   france mintel all of these services fit very well  around the circuit-switched nature of dial-up   you dial up a service you use it you hang  up you dial up another service every service   you dial up is fully self-contained however  in the worlds of university in the military   something is a foot they've started  to use something known as the internet   now the nature of the internet is very different  rather than being all circuit switched it's packet   switched each individual device connected to the  internet releases ip packets each ip packet has a   destination address and the network gets that  ip packet to the right destination never is a   circuit set up and torn down to move data it's  always individually addressed packets of data   it's into this world where we have the internet  and we have dial-up services the isps first start   to appear and this is where we're gonna start  building our little isp to build our isp we're   gonna need a minimum of one modem and for this one  modem i was gonna use my trusty old us robotics   modem i think there was a small snag i couldn't  find the power supply to my us robotics modem so after doing a bunch of setup which  we'll come on to in a second i ended up   surrendering on this motor and getting a new  little usb based one to fill in the instead   we're also going to need a modem to test that this  dial-up isp works and for this we have the modem i   accidentally bought for one pound yes i was taking  part in dudley from yesterday's quid game series   where we were supposed to buy a game for a quid  and i accidentally clicked on a bid one quid for a   modem and won a modem so i'm going to have to make  use of it just briefly why we're on the subject   of dudley from yesterday why not go check out the  yesterzine channel i'll even include a link in the   description below i mean don't go right now i mean  stay to the end of this video then you know why   not go check out yesterday anyway back to the isp  the other bit of kit i have here is a telephone   line simulator the reason for having this is i  want something to pretend to be the telephone   line why i'm testing this thing after all i  don't have two telephone lines to try it with   yeah which brings me on to using modems in general  with retro computing most modems you can't just   link the telephone line connectors on linker since  you send and receive together modems expect a few   signals from the telephone service quite as  few for example expect there to be a dial tone   now some will ignore this and just say no carrier  no carrier but you can still tell it to dial   and then it will connect up of course on the  other end you have to manually tell it to answer   but you'd also need to rig up a circuit supplying  voltage those telephone lines actually work on   something known as the current loop essentially  your telephone line provides a voltage and your   phone fluctuates that voltage and loops that  back out of the line again and that's how   the audio signal is encoded this line simulator  provides all of that it provides the dial tone it   provides all the current loops necessary and also  if you press this switch it makes the phones ring   so this gives me everything i need to pretend to  be a telephone line and to test this service with   so on the isp end i need myself a server and for  this purpose i'm going to use this here raspberry   pi because i have a lot of spare raspberry pi's  now for the purposes of this our raspberry pi is   being a bog standard unix box which is how most  isps did this back in the day now i'm not saying   exclusively some smaller isps may well have used  windows nt for this purpose but unix was pretty   much the standard approach to doing this only  there's a couple of reasons for this firstly unix   by default supports the idea of logging in over a  serial port you know for dumb terminals and likes   so that means we had a built-in system for  handling modems and also doing usernames   and passwords the next thing is thanks to bsd  yeah most unixes also had an ip stack and had   had one for quite a while i should briefly mention  before someone starts posting away in the comments   windows nt not the only alternative for unix for  this i did know one isp that used the pdp-11 for   example i mean they didn't offer anyone a fast  connection on that pdp-11 but but they used pdp-11   and they wrote their own handler for modems and  an ip stack in concurrent cpm now given you a bsd   unix available for the bdp-11 they really took the  hard road on this one now the unix setup side of   this is pretty easy first of all we have to set up  a getty for our terminal getty programs are what   unix and effect linux still uses today to provide  terminals now this is either ones connected to the   serial port or the virtual terminals you get on  the console of the machine when you're not running   x windows commonly for the virtual terminals the  next used to use a program called agetty although   systemd's probably eaten that functionality by  now but for our modem we're going to use a modem   aware version of the getty called mgetty so all  we have to do is install mgetty like so we then   need to tell systemd not to start a regular getty  on the modem so we just mask that out and then we   tell that we want to start mgetty on that device  once that's all done we have mgetty sitting and   listening on the modem waiting for an inbound  call so we'll quickly use our phone simulator   to simulate the ring and our modem will detect  that ringing tone and start issuing the sentence   ring ring across the serial port multiple times  and mgetty will see that and we'll answer the   modem with ata now on the remote machine doing  the dialing we will see that we get the unix   logon prompt and here we can use our username and  password and we'll get connected up as a regular   unix terminal over the modem now that part's not  ideal if we want to be an isp because all we've   got here is we've got the user to a shell prompt  and no isp really wants someone shelling into   their unix box no at this point we want to start  another program rather than the command shell   now there were two popular options back in the  day for this slip and ppp slip standing for serial   line ip was probably the protocol that was in most  use earlier on in the world of isps but it seemed   very much gave way to ppp so for this we're gonna  use ppp in fact ppp is still in use for modern   broadband to this day so we'll log ourselves  out of this session and hang up the telephone   now mgetty being modem aware detects that hang  up and sees the no carrier signal which means   it knows the next time it answers the call it  needs to spit out the whole login prompt again   in order to fire up pppd when the user  logs on we need to change the user's shell   so first of all we're going to create a quick  wrapper script that script is going to be the   thing that fires up pppd and we'll save that  script in /usr/local/sbin for the time being   and then we edit the /etc/shells file that allows  us to add that script into the list of valid   shells available for users because if our shell is  not in that list when a user logs on if it has a   shell that's not in the list it just gets logged  straight back out again as a security measure   so once it's in /etc/shells we then update  /etc/password and change the user's shell   from /bin/bash to our new ppp script i will  quickly mention this isn't the only way that   authentication was handled when ppp completely  took over and isps weren't offering slip anymore   authenticating in the way that you could launch  your shell script well that that became a bit   less commonplace as ppp has a mechanism to  do authentication directly using pap or chap   and mgetty supports that of its auto ppp option  what mgetty does is it listens to the beginning   of the lcp frame that tries to configure ppp if  it detects that it fires up pppd itself and pppd   authenticates the user if it doesn't detect  it then it drops to normal login prompt   and your regular chat script can run  and get you authenticated that way   now at the client end i'm gonna use windows as by  the time windows 95 came out we had full dial up   support built into the operating system prior  to this you had to install things like trumpet   winsock into windows which did the whole providing  you of an ip stack and handling the dial up side   of things now our dialup script has a couple of  standard things you'd expect to be there we have   the telephone number of the isp we're gonna dial  our username and our password and also there's   something called the chat script now windows did  ship with a standard chat script and what the   chat scripts there to handle is the initial serial  logon bit of getting into your isp so the script   for example expects to see ogin as the first  thing you can see we've avoided using the word   login itself because we don't know if it's going  to use capital l or lowercase l which is also why   the second part of the script looks for assword  now the reason you can edit this is not every   isp used the exact same bit at the beginning to  prompt for the login and also some would give you   a menu after login so you could choose things like  ppp or slip or do you just want a terminal into   their bulletin board some isps actually give you a  floppy disk that's got a dial up profile on it so   you could just choose to use that and wouldn't  have to set any of this stuff up and then there   was the likes of aol who issued more cds than  there were people on the planet containing their   big fat weird dial-up client with all this now set  up we can tell our computer to go online and here   you can hear the sounds that everyone who used  the internet back in the day remembers hearing   and about 20 minutes into your internet  experience the following scene would also occur mum I'm on the internet now what we got set up here is really not that  dissimilar to how isps of this period worked   admittedly we have just one modem so we  can support one user dialing up at once   but you can imagine with more serial  ports we could just attach more modems   and in quite a few isps that's literally what they  did you had multi-port serial cards in the box and   you connect them up to well shelves and shelves of  modems some were a little bit more sophisticated   now the rack mount modems which is essentially  a 2u chassis with a series of modem cards in   for each modem card there was a serial port on  the back to link it up to the unix box and either   a whole bunch of connections for telephone  lines or one big fat amphenol connector that   all the telephone lines came in on, in fact many  years ago i got hold of a box that had to belonged   to demon internet now at this point demon  internet when they turned up in a new area   would either rent or buy themselves a house they  bring in an x-21 lease line to bring it back to   their central network point and they'd install  a couple of rack modems and a box that contained   essentially a number of multi-port serial cards  and a card to handle the x21 line and that was a   small dial-up pop for that area so you could  ring it up using a local telephone number   in fact there was one not far from where i grew up  and a friend of mine who was in the police told me   that they got all sorts of calls about that house  as with it seeming to not have anyone living in   it and had the windows blacked out people assumed  all sorts of crimes were going on it was reported   to him as a knocking shop a growing house so a  fair few times my friend found himself having to   go around there and talk to semi-disgruntled  neighbors and trying to explain that no they   discovered it was in fact an isp and then spent  quite a while explaining what the internet was   one of the things i really like about this point  in time is more or less anyone could set up an isp   you didn't have to be a big corporation or need  a huge loan to set one up all you need was to be   able to afford essentially a pc some modems and  a connection to the internet this meant a lot of   isps sprung up many of them just served one small  region where essentially they were the only isp   with a local rate number in that area others were  big national ones so for example you had isps like   south yorkshire online which guess what dealt  with south yorkshire there was cityscape then   you had the big national ones like demon and  pipex and clarinet some of the smaller regional   isps like plus net grow out to be big national  ones eventually same with zen in this period you   could enter the industry at more or less any level  and grow now i should mention dial-up isps are not   quite like modern isps now they're expected  to provide something a little bit more than   just the internet back then your isp would also  provide you with things like an email account   and usually you'd be whatever your dial-up  username is at that ispsdomain.com or co.uk   many isps also provided web hosting in with your  monthly fee and again typically that isp's    domain name forward slash ~ your username or  your username dot the rest of that isp's domain   name some would even let you register your own  domain name and bind it to your own web space and   have a few email addresses at that domain name too  and this your isp also provides your basic other   internet services thing well that stuck around for  quite a while it took us well into the broadband   era before specialist companies emerged for doing  things like hosting email or providing web space   for you and of course in the 90s everyone had to  have their own personal home page now some of the   really observant amongst you will have noticed  when i was talking about modem speeds i did not   mention 56k in fact you'll be able to spot people  in the comment section who spotted the whole 56k   thing but didn't watch the video until this point  where i covered 56k and they will all tell me why   did you not mention 56k modems well now i am i'm  also going to mention isdn as well at this point   when i described earlier how telephone systems  worked i maybe used a more old-fashioned and   simpler explanation for how things operated  partly because this video isn't about explaining   how telephone systems work and also that  that description was true up until about the   mid 70s into the 1980s at least in the uk because  slowly across the country british telecom who were   then our embedded telco operator had started to  change all their exchanges from analog switching   to digital systems largely using plessy system x  now this changed the telephone model from one that   used pulse dialing to tone dialing for a start  but also it fundamentally shifted how things   operated your telephone to line to the exchange  operated as it pretty much always did there is   still a current loop and it still fluctuated the  voltage and that's how things operated but when it   got to the exchange in the exchange switch there  was now an analog to digital converter that took   your analog signal and turned it into a digital  signal that would then be packet switched over a   network to another exchange somewhere else that  would then use a digital to analog converter to   get the audio onto the line of the person that you  were calling by the early 90s bt had rolled this   out across the entire country and a similar thing  had happened in most other major countries too   now this represented the problem for those trying  to create 56k modems as when the analog signal   reached the exchange the exchange would not  do the best job of converting it to digital   as the modulation needed was pretty close to  the sample rate of the exchange this means by   the time it got to the receiving modem the audio  was distorted and well yeah it didn't work now   obviously there was a solution to this problem  because you know 56k modems were a thing and   the solution to that problem was isdn now even if  you lived for this whole period you could have gone   your whole life without being aware of isdn in any  way shape or form because in the domestic space in   most countries isdn barely made an impact except  for germany in germany isdn did really well but   that's you know to do with reunification the fact  that 50% of the country needed its technology base   completely replacing isdn stood for integrated  digital services network and was a purely digital   telephony service it was still by and large  circuit switched like traditional phone systems   okay i do know about the whole frame relay thing i  just really don't want to get into it here and it   allows you to place both voice and data calls in  fact i've got an isdn telephone here you can see   unsurprisingly it's german ISDN telephone  this gave companies that were working on potential   56k modems a solution as an isdn phone could ring  a regular pots telephone this meant that the whole   phone call was digital all the way up to the local  exchange where it then get converted to analog   because the sound was presented to the telephone  system in a digital format when its little digital   to analog converter ran everything was perfectly  in sync this meant you had no issues with the   audio being of a similar frequency to that of the  maximum that the sample rate could support so in   short our audio didn't get corrupted the next  part of the solution was on the analog side you   simply didn't have as much bandwidth coming from  the end user dialing the isp as you'd have coming   back the other way as that side now stayed well  away from the max the sample rate would support   there were no alignment issues and this for the  first time means that we had an asynchronous   connection between user and isp you could  download at a faster rate than you could upload   this server created the first major technological  shift for isps with previous improvements in   modems they just been able to well replace their  modems they kept the telephone lines they kept all   the serial connections to the box that ran them  they just you know changed their modems over time   well if 56k modems they wouldn't be able to use  their analog lines they'd have to shift over to   isdn now isps had used isdn before in some cases  and they used a device that looked very much like   a modem in fact lots of people did refer to it  as an isdn modem only it doesn't deal in sound   it would actually make essentially a data call  but the things did look like a modem box and it   did support the at command set so i can see why  people called them that but those were usually   one or two small devices in an isp connected up  to basic rate isdn lines and those devices would   not be capable of terminating 56k modem calls no  for that a whole new class of device was created   there were two major vendors of this bit of  kit firstly there was livingston in its port   master range that would get bought by lucent to  make the lucent port master and then there was   also asend that made its max range of kit now as  you can see these boxes look very different they   essentially take what's known as a primary rate  isdn line yes there were two types of isdn line   basic rate which is the kind of one you get at  home or in a small business premises and that had   two 64k channels that could be used for data and  also an extra channel that was used to control the   isdn line and then you'd have primary rate isdn  that had 30 channels of 64 kilobits and again   a slightly bigger control channel well at least  those speeds are accurate for europe inside the us   yeah those speeds are a bit slower because you use  a fundamentally lower frequency to base everything   on now these boxes also arrived at the time that  isps needed to well consolidate down the amount of   equipment they were using the internet had become  a lot more popular and the number of modems and   lines you needed was exploding and at 2u for every  16 modems yeah it was taking up a lot of space too   now this is where these boxes really  helped because one of them could say take   one primary rate isdn line or two primary rate isdn  lines some even went up to four or six with each   isdn line carrying 30 channels well that really  consolidated down the amount of equipment an isp   needed but this is where i need to point out that  this technology was really disruptive to the isp   industry because these boxes they cost a lot if  you're talking dealing with a minimum of 30 lines   to start with that's going to be an expensive  box and it meant that isps would essentially   have to throw away most of their modems and their  analog lines this is where many small isps just   exited out the market at this point they couldn't  afford the new equipment refreshing well they   found other more profitable things to do i'll come  back onto that later when we start talking about   business services but for the big players and the  more medium-sized of the smaller players this was   a pretty useful change in many ways but also it  did hit bank balances fairly hard with the change   of this kit also came the introduction of a new  technology one you may have heard of radius radius   is in fact still with us and is used by isps today  for authenticating broadband connections and also   by wi-fi what radius let us do is authenticate  users who are dialing up and also send back   information like should they use ppp what their  ip address is that sort of thing and this was very   useful because these boxes they did not connect  via a serial port to a unix box oh no they had   their own ethernet port in it and would drop the  traffic onto either 10 or 100 megabit ethernet so   they did need some form of external authentication  system and radius well that was the answer radius   also provided our accounting details so we could  see when people had logged in how long they've   been on and when they'd hung up you could also use  the radius protocol to terminate sessions as well   this again made life a little bit simpler for  isp administrators as we no longer needed users   on a unix box to equal isp users and that saved  us of all the weird difficulties you had with   synchronizing users between different unix boxes  that we were terminating the pvp connections on we   could also soon start using radius to authenticate  our email users and ftp access into websites as   well not too long after the creation of radius  free radius came into existence as a project   and that version really flourished and is in fact  still in production today now we've got our isp   built it's time to get someone who isn't me to  dial into it i'm going to plug this modem into   a real telephone line and i'm going to hand over  to friend of the channel mr johnny blanchard who's   going to dial up our isp it's my job to dial  up to john's dial-up service and that proved   to be a small problem because i don't really  have machines that have modems so my newer one   here the only new machine i've got that is way  past the time when we have modems that hasn't   got one built in my other machines turned me  things like msx's which didn't even understand   the concept of modem really apart from a few tiny  ones at the end um so i've got you for that but   fortunately i recently received this which is  an nec pc 98 machine running windows 3.1 there's  

no internet on it but it does have a terminal  dialer so we can use that to log in now there   will be some screen rolling because i don't have  a fancy camera that can match the frame rate of   the screen so uh there will be a little bit of  flickering but you should be enough to see what's   going on yeah so here we are now this is the dial  up program it's in japanese of course because this   is a pc 98 which is a japanese machine so we  just hit dial and that will dial john's number oh there's that lovely the  ringtones and then in the minute   there we are the cat are walling  that brings back a lot of memories oh there we go we are connected john's welcome message there so if i log in so   i am jay blanchard there's a bit of lag  obviously we're going over a phone line and my super secret password and there we go we are logged in they are and there we go we have a readme file   which i imagine is what we see on the screen  there so there we are we are logged in   over the phone line to john's fully working  dial-up service i'll hand you back to john himself   well there we go thanks very much johnny we have  proved that the isp does in fact work i know   everyone here knows how the world of dial-up isps  ended yes we are in fact waiting for the asteroid   that is broadband to come wipe us out but before  we do yeah there's one more major change in the   isp industry we need to have a little chat about  now i'm going to talk about this from a very   british perspective because that happens to be the  one that i know best but a similar story did play   out in other countries across europe i don't know  so much in the us but certainly across the rest   of europe this next challenge the isp market  was a lot more about the economics of things   rather than the actual technology in the uk our  state telephone company that was the gpo had been   spun off and privatised to become british telecom  and this introduced competition into the telephone   market for the first time in the uk similar things  also happen in many other european nations too   and in this model your telephone company the  one you chose would charge you for any telephone   calls but also it would get charged by other  telephone companies that terminated calls for   it this meant suddenly there was money to be made  in receiving calls particularly for the telcos   which meant that telephone companies competed  with each other they all sought to attract large   destination telephone numbers to their network  so for example call centers and of course isps   this led to the situation where telephone  companies were willing to offer some of the   money they made on receiving inbound calls to the  people who at the other end of the telephone line   the ISP the other significant change in the  telco market that was happening at the same time   was that the march to digital exchanges had meant  that calls between exchanges were cheaper than   ever before which meant that the likes of bt  was able to offer a local rate national number   these 0845 numbers were charged at a local rate to  the person dialing the number and yet could land   anywhere in the uk these two changes were about  to create a massive shake-up in the isp industry   as previously small local and regional isps have  managed to stay in business because phone calls   to them were cheaper because they were the  only local rate provider some national isps   like demon would set up a point of presence in  a particular location so they could have local   numbers as well but because they were forced to be  distributed for this they could never bring their   economies of scale to bear this meant they could  never really dominate over the local isps local   rate national numbers meant that a big isp could  then start to concentrate its network and start to   bring economies of scale to bear the other part of  this was the economic model in which isps operated   every customer would pay their isp a monthly fee  for the right to gain access to the network on top   of that customers would then pay their telephone  company for the phone calls that they made to the   isp thus local rate calls save people a lot of  money but with isp starting to get a kickback   well the model could change and soon in the uk  one company changed it that company was free serve   the model free serve introduced was that you were  paying no monthly fee you would only pay for your   phone calls to them the isp free serve would make  its money from the revenue it generated from the   inbound calls now free service started by dixon  store group a fairly large operator here in the   uk operates a number of electronic retail stores  including dixon's comet curries and pc world   they joined forces with leeds isp planet online to  create free serve later the whole thing will be   purchased by french telecom subsidiary wanado free serve really upended the financial   model for most isps and its model of free at the  point of use really did seem to appeal to people   suddenly people stopped paying their 10 pounds  a month and switched over to free surf which   created a bit of a crisis in the isp industry for  everybody else it also didn't help that free serve was owned by dixon's store group who if you're  buying a computer in the uk chances are you're   probably buying it through one of their stores  and on the counter next to the till there's a   big old pile of free serve cds that someone would  hopefully point out exist and say why don't you   try these they're free this is where a bunch of  isps disappear out of the market smaller regional   ones had maybe seen the changes coming and sold  themselves to larger isps to be their regional pop   some of the established regional isps the likes of  plusnet were one of the first to decide to change   business model they would also shift eventually  to a free serve type model where they ditched the   idea of the monthly payment and you just dialed up  and paid your telephone bill other isps well they   decided to diversify and change the business that  they were operating in this is where i'll come   back to this thing i mentioned earlier about the  business isp side of things see plenty of small   regional isps have been dealing with businesses  helping with the email and with their web presence   now most of these companies had some form of  it service provider that was more of a desktop   support kind of provider they'd help you with  office packages and sage and accounting stuff they   may even set up the odd file server for you but  when it came to the internet yeah they're a little   bit lost at sea businesses turned to their isp to  help them set up things like corporate group mail   servers and get that stuff actually working this  soon meant that some local isps were making more   money from those business services and they were  making out providing internet in the first place   so when free serve turned up well their  domestic customers disappeared off but   their business customers they remained dialing up  collecting their email over isdn and those local   isps they just kept servicing that consultancy  and support demand that had built up sometimes   these isps would merge up with a local desktop  support company and we'd see these businesses   essentially turn into i.t consultancies with a bit  of internet on the side until eventually broadband   appeared and the bits of internet on the side and  that stopped being a thing soon though after this   the giant asteroid that was the broadband industry  arrived and wiped out the dial-up industry in a   couple of years time some isps successfully made  the leap from dial up to broadband and others just   vanished along the way soon the technology that  underpinned dial-up isps will disappear from the   uk and many other countries with isdn due to be  shut down in the uk next year with plain old pots lines following fairly shortly afterwards  now if you're watching this at home and you're   wondering a few people are still using a landline  telephone don't worry you'll still be able to use   it it's just instead of the telephone line working  in the old traditional way bt are going to provide   you with a little box that turns your telephone  call into a series of ip packets yep your phone   call it's gonna go over the internet now some  of you may realize that pots telephone line can   do something that a modern broadband connection  or indeed a mobile phone can't do which is keep   working in the prolonged power cut a thing the  uk has had no shortages of this winter as various   once in a hundred year weather events that appear  to happen multiple times in a single year now   happened these events in some cases have  led to hundreds of thousands of people   not having power for days on end and if  in that event you can't make an emergency   phone call or bring your electricity company to  find out when you might have some electricity   well that's not a good thing some of you may be  thinking i can just keep my mobile charged right   i've got one of those recharging batteries i can  keep it going for a few days and yes you might be   able to unfortunately your mobile operator has  not put a sufficient quantity of batteries in   the mobile mast and that doesn't work anymore now  you might think with the impending switch off that   somebody might be doing something about this and  all the evidence would point to no no they they   don't appear to be it would seem BT kind of  going gung-ho on this one because well it saves BT   a lot of cost and politicians are not realizing  there's much of an issue you see your average mp   probably doesn't know that bt is turning off its  analog services because it's not exactly being   well publicized i mean have you seen it in the  news and also your average mp doesn't understand a   lot about telecommunication and how it works they  probably assume their mobile would keep working   there's a lot of people who showed us who  have power cuts this winter yeah no they don't   so at some point i'm hoping pots either gains a  reprieve or that mobile operators get some form of   requirement placed upon them to keep operating  in emergency conditions now if anything i've just   said in the last few minutes kind of alarms you a  little bit yeah i mean it probably shut a tiny bit   and if you want to write your local mp to say hey  there's this impending problem yeah that may not   be the worst idea well if you made it all the way  to this point i'd like to say thank you very much   for watching we've learnt about the history of  dial-up isps we've made a dial up isp we've got   poor johnny to dial it so it just remains for  me to say thanks to retro princess for lending   us her acting talents and also thank you very much  johnny blanchard for recording that section for us   i might also suggest perhaps you could go  watch all of their channels after this   and of course yesterzine who i mentioned  earlier if you enjoyed this video why not click   that little thumbs up thing at the bottom because  that apparently really helps people find the video   and if you want to talk about isps with  us well there's the comment section below   and as ever i'd say if you're feeling very kind  why not subscribe because that makes a huge   difference to whether youtube can be bothered  telling people that these videos actually exist

2022-04-05 16:27

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