Wow...this brings back some memories. Back in the 90s, 2400 baud dial-up was still a normal thing, I was employee #1 at a bootstrapped ISP. It was started in some spare office space in the back of a warehouse by some college friends and financed mostly on credit cards.
The equipment was mostly home rolled, real MacGyver type stuff, but we targeted above average industry standards for service. With a little advertising, amazingly we grew very fast and hit several thousand subscribers in just a few months. We eventually outgrew our space and moved into another one just next door to our upstream provider who ran a cable through their ceiling/our floor so we could have have service.
I worked there as we slowly upgraded equipment until we were 56k on all lines and then we started hitting major capital equipment cost issues. Getting those phone company to get us the proper lines for 56k was hard enough (their standard of service was "if you can hear a voice it's fine"), but getting equipment that could support ISDN -- the next big thing -- was a huge transition point.
So we sunk virtually all of our money into the equipment, and then the industry rapidly moved on to rolling out DSL. Turns out customer weren't generally willing to pay the extra fees involved in having ISDN service and were willing to simply wait for the DSL rollout.
Effectively locked out of the new Internet access technology (you could only really offer it at that time if you owned the last mile lines and we could never get close to affording that) the company was sold and we all moved on -- a story that was repeated thousands of times across the country.
To put into perspective the magnitude of the change in the industry, it would be like somebody starting an ISP today, being able to buy and run fiber to the last mile and all that, and then next year a blimp fleet and satellite constellation started offering higher speed, more reliable internet for about the same price you were barely scraping by on. And now to compete you need to launch your own fleets and constellations.
The equipment was mostly home rolled, real MacGyver type stuff, but we targeted above average industry standards for service. With a little advertising, amazingly we grew very fast and hit several thousand subscribers in just a few months. We eventually outgrew our space and moved into another one just next door to our upstream provider who ran a cable through their ceiling/our floor so we could have have service.
I worked there as we slowly upgraded equipment until we were 56k on all lines and then we started hitting major capital equipment cost issues. Getting those phone company to get us the proper lines for 56k was hard enough (their standard of service was "if you can hear a voice it's fine"), but getting equipment that could support ISDN -- the next big thing -- was a huge transition point.
So we sunk virtually all of our money into the equipment, and then the industry rapidly moved on to rolling out DSL. Turns out customer weren't generally willing to pay the extra fees involved in having ISDN service and were willing to simply wait for the DSL rollout.
Effectively locked out of the new Internet access technology (you could only really offer it at that time if you owned the last mile lines and we could never get close to affording that) the company was sold and we all moved on -- a story that was repeated thousands of times across the country.
To put into perspective the magnitude of the change in the industry, it would be like somebody starting an ISP today, being able to buy and run fiber to the last mile and all that, and then next year a blimp fleet and satellite constellation started offering higher speed, more reliable internet for about the same price you were barely scraping by on. And now to compete you need to launch your own fleets and constellations.