March 11, 1985: ConnNet Lets the Public Jack In, X.25 Style

1985: The nation’s first local, public packet-switching network opens for business. Can ISPs be far behind? Hooking in to the world’s network of interconnected computers isn’t a notable event these days, especially now that millions of us have always-on connections in our mobile devices that are rarely beyond arm’s reach. But 25 years ago, things […]

__1985: __The nation's first local, public packet-switching network opens for business. Can ISPs be far behind?

Hooking in to the world's network of interconnected computers isn't a notable event these days, especially now that millions of us have always-on connections in our mobile devices that are rarely beyond arm's reach.

But 25 years ago, things were very different when the Southern New England Telephone Company turned on ConnNet. It was the first local, public packet-switched network in the United States.

Customers in Connecticut could connect in and reach NewsNet, the National Library of Medicine, CompuServe and Dow Jones News Retrieval. Companies could rent dedicated lines and get service from 4,800 to an astonishing 56,000 bits per second.

Computers using dial-up connections pulled down 300 to 1,200 bits per second. (If you have a 5-Mbps connection now, you are downloading more than 4,000 times as fast as the fastest ConnNet dial-up.) Employees could log in to their office mainframe remotely, if their employers paid to hook their systems into ConnNet.

ConnNet was not technically the first public internet service provider, however. It was instead part of a global network using the X.25 protocol, which was rendered obsolete in the 1990s by the more popular Internet Protocol, or IP, which you're probably using to read this post right now.

Southern New England Telephone Company was not new to bringing the latest telecommunications technology to consumers. It opened the first commercial telephone exchange in the world in New Haven, Connecticut, on Jan. 28, 1878. It had 21 subscribers.

The company also printed the world's first phone book. Its business was always independent of AT&T, until it was bought up in 1998 by SBC Communications (now AT&T), and is now known as AT&T Connecticut.

ConnNet's anniversary comes a little less than a week before the FCC releases the first-ever national broadband plan, which will call for expanding broadband to all Americans -- in part by making it more affordable. It sets a goal for 2020 of 100 million Americans having 100-Mbps broadband connections. That's more than 300,000 times faster than the basic 300-bps service of 1985.
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Source: Various*

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