INTERNET SERVICES^H PROVIDER
2025-08-06
Do you remember when your domestic ISP - Internet Service Provider - used to
be an Internet Services Provider? They were only sometimes actually called
that, but what I mean is: when ISPs provided more than one Internet service?
Not just connectivity, but... more.
IMG Web page listing 'Standard Services' for dial-up and leased line connections, including: user homepages, FTP, email, usenet, IRC, email-to-fax, and fax-to-email services.
ISPS TWENTY YEARS AGO
It used to just be expected that your ISP would provide you with not only an
Internet connection, but also some or all of:
* A handful of email inboxes, plus SMTP relaying
* Shared or private FTP storage (ISP-provided shared FTP servers would also
frequently provide locally-available copies of Internet software essentials
for a variety of platforms. This wasn't just a time-saver - downloading
Netscape Navigator from your ISP rather than from half-way across the world
was much faster! - it was also a way to discover new software, curated by
people like you: a smidgen of the feel of a well-managed BBS, from the comfort
of your local ISP!)
* Hosting for small Websites/homepages
* Usenet access
* Email-to-fax and/or fax-to-email services
* Caching forward proxies (this was so-commonplace that it isn't even listed
in the "standard services" screenshot above)
* One or more local nodes to IRC networks
* Sometimes, licenses for useful Internet software
* For leased-line (technically "broadband", by the original definition)
connections: a static IP address or IP pool
IMG Stylish (for circa 2000) webpage for HoTMetaL Pro 6.0, advertising its 'unrivaled [sic] editing, site management and publishing tools'.
ISPS TODAY
The ISP I hinted at above doesn't exist any more, after being bought out and
bought out and bought out by a series of owners. But I checked the Website of
the current owner to see what their "standard services" are, and discovered
that they are:
* A pretty-shit router (ISP-provided routers are, in my experience, pretty
crap 50% of the time... although they've been improving over the last decade
as consumers have started demanding that their WiFi works well, rather
than just works.)
* Optional 4G backup connectivity (for an extra fee)
* A voucher for 3 months access to a streaming service (These streaming
services vouchers are probably just a loss-leader for the streaming service,
who know that you'll likely renew at full price afterwards.)
The connection is faster, which is something, but we're still talking about
the "baseline" for home Internet access then-versus-now. Which feels a bit
galling, considering that (a) you're clearly, objectively, getting fewer
services, and (b) you're paying more for them - a cheap basic home Internet
subscription today, after accounting for inflation, seems to cost about 25%
more than it did in 2000. (Okay, in 2000 you'd have also have had to pay
per-minute for the price of the dial-up call... but that money went to BT (or
perhaps Mercury or KCOM), not to your ISP. But my point still stands: in a
world where technology has in general gotten cheaper and backhaul capacity has
become underutilised, why has the basic domestic Internet connection gotten
less feature-rich and more-expensive? And often with worse customer service,
to boot.)
Are we getting a bum deal?
IMG An xternal 33.6kbps serial port dial-up modem.
WOULD YOU EVEN WANT THOSE SERVICES?
Some of them were great conveniences at the time, but perhaps not-so-much now:
a caching server, FTP site, or IRC node in the building right at the end of my
dial-up connection? That's a speed boost that was welcome over a slow
connection to an unencrypted service, but is redundant and ineffectual today.
And if you're still using a fax-to-email service for any purpose, then I think
you have bigger problems than your ISP's feature list!
Some of them were things I wouldn't have recommend that you depend on, even
then: tying your email and Web hosting to your connectivity provider traded
one set of problems for another. A particular joy of an email address, as
opposed to a postal address (or, back in the day, a phone number), is that it
isn't tied to where you live. You can move to a different town or even to a
different country and still have the same email address, and that's a great
thing! But it's not something you can guarantee if your email address is tied
to the company you dial-up to from the family computer at home. A similar
issue applies to Web hosting, although for a true traditional "personal home
page": a little information about yourself, and your bookmarks, it would be
fine.
But some of them were things that were actually useful and I miss: honestly,
it's a pain to have to use a third-party service for newsgroup access, which
used to be so-commonplace that you'd turn your nose up at an ISP that didn't
offer it as standard. A static IP being non-standard on fixed connections is a
sad reminder that the 'net continues to become less-participatory,
more-centralised, and just generally more watered-down and shit: instead of
your connection making you "part of" the Internet, nowadays it lets you
"connect to" the Internet, which is a very different experience. (The problem
of your connection not making you "part of" the Internet is multiplied if you
suffer behind carrier-grade NAT, of course. But it feels like if we actually
cared enough to commit to rolling out IPv6 everywhere we could obviate the
need for that particular turd entirely. And yet... I'll bet that the ISPs who
currently use it will continue to do so, even as the offer IPv6 addresses
as-standard, because they buy into their own idea that it's what their
customers want.)
But the Web hosting, for example, wasn't useless. In fact, it served an
important purpose in lowering the barrier to entry for people to publish their
first homepage! The magical experience of being able to just FTP some files
into a directory and have them be on the Web, as just a standard part of the
"package" you bought-into, was a gateway to a participatory Web that's
nowadays sadly lacking.
IMG 'Setting Up your Web Site, Step by Step Instructions' page, describing use of an FTP client to upload web pages.
Yeah, sure, you can set up a static site (unencumbered by any opinionated
stack) for free on Github Pages, Neocities, or wherever, but the barrier to
entry has been raised by just enough that, doubtless, there are literally
millions of people who would have taken that first step... but didn't.
And that makes me sad.
LINKS
HTML My blog post about how the definition of "broadband" has changed over the years
HTML My recent Mastodon toot which is sort-of a cut-down version of this post