Cost of the intertubes a decade ago?

September 11, 2008 1:02 PM

How much did the internets cost 10 years ago?

When people started getting AOL at home back in 1997/1998 (maybe earlier? I don't know, I was young), how much did it cost per month? Were there providers other than AOL?

posted by KateHasQuestions to Technology (41 answers total)

Around that time, I think monthly dial-up was about $10 a month if you weren't getting it from your research or university for free. Most of the providers were local back then, if I remember correctly.
posted by cimbrog at 1:10 PM on September 11, 2008

10 years ago I had dialup access locally in Athens, OH via a provider that is still around called Frognet. I believe I paid $20 a month or so for 56K access.
posted by griffey at 1:11 PM on September 11, 2008

In the UK, my dial-up had no monthly fee but cost 1 penny per minute.
posted by afx237vi at 1:15 PM on September 11, 2008

Early 1999, Earthlink dialup cost 19.95/month.
posted by notsnot at 1:20 PM on September 11, 2008

I think I paid $40 a month for DSL in '98. Probably 2-3Mb down, 512k up. Maybe 384 up. I don't think I had dialup since '96 at the latest. Before that I paid maybe $20 a month for dialup. At one point I bought a block of 100 dialup hours for a fixed price. I still had not used all the hours when they deleted my account for lack of use a couple of years ago.
posted by GuyZero at 1:21 PM on September 11, 2008

I was in fairly small town (only 1 local ISP) and it was ~$25/month for 56k.

From wikipedia:
"Originally, AOL charged its users an hourly fee, but in 1996 this changed and a flat rate of $19.99 a month was charged."
posted by wolfkult at 1:22 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1996, AOL went to flat-rate billing at $19.95 a month. Shortly before that, I think we paid that much for 10 or 20 hours a month, with additional hours at $2.95 or $3.95. We definitely didn't have 56k service, and were lucky to manage to connect at 28.8kbps, even.

There were lots and lots of local ISPs, though, offering flat-rate service before AOL did, at about $20 a month.
posted by uncleozzy at 1:22 PM on September 11, 2008

Prodigy dial up was about $40 a month or so in Baltimore in 1996/97 IIRC. Expensive. And then you were limited to a certain number of hours of use - I can't remember how many - and if you used more, than your bill went up. That was a drag, since it was easy to get bored and wander off during the approximate ten years it took to load a single page and then your next month's bill would be astronomical.
posted by mygothlaundry at 1:24 PM on September 11, 2008

In the UK I had a choice... free connection with penny a minute phone charge (of which the ISP got a share) or £15 for unlimited free connection 'offpeak' ('peak' was 8am-6pm Mon-Fri) with a freephone number and chunk of webspace.

I miss Force9. They used to rock. I've still got their install CD somewhere.

Strictly dialup connection, and we used to max out at something like 52k on a 56.6 modem.

Depressingly I can still whistle their phone number and the modem handshake...
posted by twine42 at 1:24 PM on September 11, 2008

When my parents first got dial-up ('96? '97?) they didn't have a flat monthly fee; rather they had a flat fee for so many minutes of use per day, and then extra for every minute you went over that. They used a provider called Mindspring. Several of my friends used Prodigy.
posted by frobozz at 1:27 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1999 I got 384kbps SDSL for $40-50/month. It was about the same price I would have paid for a dedicated phone line + dial-up internet account. I think the dial-up account I'd had for the previous 4-5 years was $20/month and didn't have any practical limits on connection time. I think my modem was 14.4kbps. I think 28.8 modems may have been available by the time I switched to DSL.

There were lots of small local ISPs well before AOL offered internet access. I think Earthlink was one of the first national ISPs.
posted by Good Brain at 1:28 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1996, AOL went to flat-rate billing at $19.95 a month. Shortly before that, I think we paid that much for 10 or 20 hours a month, with additional hours at $2.95 or $3.95.

Yes, that sounds about right (I definitely got in trouble a few times for using too many hours on our AOL account). That was for dial-up service to local connection numbers.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 1:28 PM on September 11, 2008 [2 favorites]

I recall setting up a 768k DSL line for a small business. I believe we paid $99.00 per month. This was in 1996.
posted by Gungho at 1:31 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1994 I got 14.4kbps dialup in a small (college) town for $20/month. It came with one mailbox, "unlimited" bandwidth, access to Usenet, and ~5MB of storage on an Apache webserver that was running Perl. I vaguely remember upgrading my modem at some point to one of them fast new 19.2kbps models and getting a huge speed increase.
posted by togdon at 1:31 PM on September 11, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for your answers! Crazy how much things change in 10-15 years, eh? (no, I'm not Canadian, I just like to say eh). This threat and this one were useful.
posted by KateHasQuestions at 1:37 PM on September 11, 2008

Wow, I remember when my dial-up went up to $20 a month in the early '00's and I was outraged. I guess having a university in town giving it out for free kept the prices around me artificially low.
posted by cimbrog at 1:47 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1995 I got Dialup, $20 a month for electronic payment $22 a month for paper bills. 28.8 speeds on the good phone lines :)
posted by gog at 1:50 PM on September 11, 2008

Ten years ago I had Internet via cable through shaw.ca. Pretty much the same price as I pay now, pretty much the same speed I have now.

When I first got on the Internet in 1991, I had free dialup access through my university. I had to get my own connection in '93, and paid about $20/month for dialup with a now-defunct local provider. I was on dialup with a variety of carriers from '93 to '98 and have had broadband since then.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 1:50 PM on September 11, 2008

In the UK here too - we were paying 2p/minute (half to the phone company, half to the ISP).

Furthermore, a 33.6kbps modem cost £200 ($400).
posted by Mike1024 at 1:52 PM on September 11, 2008

I didn't see this part of the question answered, so I'll say that AOL had been around in one form or another since the mid-80s, but it wasn't "internet access" until much later.
posted by cabingirl at 1:52 PM on September 11, 2008

1996: Netcom: 33.8k over phone modem, usually ran in the neighborhood of 28k, but sometimes 14.4k. Unlimited time on local call, but had to use some keepalive method to stay connected for more than an hour or two. This cost 19.95/mo.
posted by buzzv at 1:56 PM on September 11, 2008

"10 years ago I had dialup access locally in Athens, OH via a provider that is still around called Frognet. I believe I paid $20 a month or so for 56K access."

I also had Frognet access in Athens at about the same time, and yep, it was $20 a month.

From there, I moved to Eurekanet, which cost the same, and then finally, Time Warner's Roadrunner, which currently costs me.....a lot :)
posted by newfers at 1:58 PM on September 11, 2008

In '99 I had an AOL account, and that's been mentioned already. I switched from that to a local ISP account (since AOL's software didn't support Windows 2000) which was roughly $11 for 56k dial-up. In early 2001, the local ISP sold their customer base to Earthlink, which was still roughly double the price I was paying, so I dropped that account. I then heard about Everyone's Internet (based out of Houston) that had just started offering local coverage in my area for $10. I had that account for 4 years until the fall of 2005.
posted by phrayzee at 2:42 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1995, MSN (which was like AOL but with less sex) was $25 a month, if I remember correctly.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:46 PM on September 11, 2008

Comcast@Home cable internet service was $40 is most cities per month with a five dollar discount if you were already a Comcast subscriber. I don't think bandwidth was capped, so it was nearly 1 megabit per second in some cases.
posted by plasticbugs at 2:56 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1999 I paid $20 per month for 56k dial-up access. Problem was, I live in a small town and I had to dial into the nearest metro. So I paid long distance charges on top of that.
posted by chitlin at 2:56 PM on September 11, 2008

I was on netzero for a while -around that time - and got free (crappy) dial-up (it was 56k but, no, not really) in exchange for being served their ads.

Dial-up (14.4, then 56k) in a small college town in between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, IA back in '98 was $25 or so.
posted by porpoise at 3:03 PM on September 11, 2008

In early 1999 I seem to remember my mother paying $20 a month for 35 hours of 56k use (in Victoria BC with a local ISP)...

(35 HOURS A MONTH! I now need 35 hours a day)
posted by rhinny at 3:42 PM on September 11, 2008

I was on a local provider in NYC (panix - which I think is still online) from 1991 to about 96. I believe a shell account was $20/mo, and a SLIP/PPP (dialup) was $30/mo. I wandered from ISP to ISP after 96 searching for the cheapest rates and generally paid about $15 a month until I got DSL in 98 or 99 I believe. I haven't had dialup since.
posted by Calloused_Foot at 4:12 PM on September 11, 2008

My internet access ran over $200 a month in Japan since all calls were 10c/minute, even the ISDN connection to my ISP.

NTT's "Telehodai" program (free dialing to the ISP from 11PM to 8AM) for ~$20/mo lowered the bill a lot; I think I joined this in 1998.

Things have gotten a lot better there, I hear.
posted by troy at 5:05 PM on September 11, 2008

$39.95 for DSL (Zoomtown) + $19.95 for the ISP account (FUSE) you had to maintain...

Cincinnati Bell, early 1998
posted by Mick at 5:19 PM on September 11, 2008

Back then I was paying $30/month for AOL.

A few years earlier than that and you had to pay hourly. It was hell.
posted by Nattie at 5:51 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1999, we got 384kbps SDSL. It was ridiculously expensive, something like $200/month.
posted by kdar at 6:39 PM on September 11, 2008

I paid about AUD30/month for dialup in Australia (could've been 56k... my modem was 14.4k) in 1995. I hadn't heard of AOL.

My next connection, in 1999, was in the UK, and was free (actually, I received some close-to-worthless shares to use it) from totalise.co.uk in return for a little ad-banner thingy. Eventually (still 1999) yahoo gave free net in the uk just to annoy other ISP's. NB: at this stage, BT would charge for time on local calls, so the ISP received nothing, but it wasn't quite 'free'.
posted by pompomtom at 9:40 PM on September 11, 2008

Around that time, I got broadband for the first time, and was also working at a dialup ISP not very long before.

I believe we were charging $19.95 CAD per month for effectively unlimited dialup. When I first bought broadband (aDSL) I am pretty sure I paid 49.95/month.

The really sad part is that I am on cable now and am still paying $49.95/month.
posted by Kickstart70 at 10:19 PM on September 11, 2008

free x hours/month disks from AOL/compuserve '95
'96-99 $19.99/month from local ISP for 14.4k -> 56k. (unlimited hours)
then free in university '99-00 (uncapped / unshaped / uncontrolled. Napster rocked!)
posted by defcom1 at 11:29 PM on September 11, 2008

I got my first cable modem in 1999 for $25 a month through the local electric utility in Newnan, GA - they had run fiber during an infrastructure upgrade, and were competing with Charter. Pretty sure I was paying $25 for cable (no digital boxes, just the enhanced 50+ channels) as well.

I miss that. One time in the middle of the day when no one was home I ran some speed tests and clocked 9Mb speeds - mostly because so few folks had signed up in my 'node', and they weren't segmenting at all...
posted by pupdog at 11:30 PM on September 11, 2008

In 1998, dialup was typically about $20/mo in Northern California.

I think I was on the first cheap DSL by then, from Pac Bell, which I believe was about $75/mo. (this was incredibly cheap at the time, when a T1 of equivalent speed was over $1000/mo.)
posted by Malor at 9:24 AM on September 12, 2008

I think when Cable was introduced here in Toronto around 1997/98, it was $50 a month. It dropped to $40 a month a little while after. I can't remember the speed. Prior to that, I had a dial up connection which was probably $15-$20 a month. I had a Compuserve account which was about the same price prior to that, in the early 90s.
posted by chunking express at 10:12 AM on September 12, 2008

There were also lots of freenet connections that would let you get on the Internet. They were all dialup -- text only browsing, etc.
posted by chunking express at 10:13 AM on September 12, 2008

1991/92 we had Prodigy - I remember my dad saying something about it being $25/month. I recall there being some limitation on hours, but I don't know if we ever went over or how much extra that cost.
posted by KAS at 11:46 AM on September 12, 2008