The nation’s first local, public packet-switching network opens for business.
Hooking into 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 mobile devices that are rarely beyond arm’s reach. But things were different when the Southern New England Telephone Company turned on ConnNet. It was the first local, public packet-switching network in the United States.
Customers in Connecticut could connect and reach NewsNet, the National Library of Medicine, CompuServe (see here), and Dow Jones News Retrieval. Companies could rent dedicated lines and get service from 4,800 to an astonishing 56,000 bits per second. Employees of subscribing companies could dial in from home to log in to their office mainframe. But computers using dial-up connections pulled down only 300 to 1,200 bits per second. (If you have a 5Mbps connection now, you are downloading more than 4,000 times as fast as the fastest ConnNet dial-up.)
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.
Southern New England Telephone Company was a pioneer in bringing the latest telecommunications technology to consumers. It opened the first commercial phone exchange in the world in New Haven, Connecticut, on January 28, 1878, with twenty-one subscribers. The company also printed the world’s first phone book.
The FCC’s 2010 national broadband plan sets a goal for 2020 of 100 million Americans having 100Mbps broadband connections. That’s more than 300,000 times faster than the basic 300bps service of 1985.—RS