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