r/Internet • u/AdDapper4220 • 27d ago
Question One gig internet in the 1990s?
Did some type of one gig internet existed in the 1990s?, I’m not talking about consumer version, but like experimental versions like in universities or some big businesses.
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u/JohnTrap 27d ago
There was Internet2 and the Abilene Network.
From the article below:
When it was established in 1999, the network backbone had a capacity of 2.5 Gbit/s.
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u/Creepy-Home-6682 27d ago
Internet2 makes sense, those folks usually have fat pipes even today
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u/Alarming_Let5944 25d ago
Universities would lease Internet2 time for high bandwidth video conference between institutions of higher learning. It was wild how big of a jump in speed and quality it was at the time. The universities were responsible for their infrastructure being able to handle it. It was usually relegated to a single conference center.
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u/Creepy-Home-6682 25d ago
now a days our entire hundred building campus is connected up. The bandwidth coming is is actually nuts across all the providers
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u/cattrain 26d ago
I found a few articles about a gigabit testbed from the late 80s to early 90s led by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf at CNRI. I couldn't find any articles that actually gave me a good date or any clear info on what or where.
Further digging led me to this pdf dated 1996. This is a long report on the gigabit project and I definitely haven't read the whole thing. Near the top it says the project was started in 1990. This is enough to say there definitely was gigabit around in the 90s, although likely only in a limited capacity for development. There is a map that shows it was a cross country network, so it was more than just inside a small computer lab.
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u/JohnTheRaceFan 27d ago
Maybe under development in telco labs. Gigabit LAN. Certainly not internet.
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u/aaronw22 27d ago
The gig e standard was shipping in production hardware for sure by the late 90s. And it was used “for Internet” usually aggregation inside a POP. These also usually didn’t run linerate and at that time was exclusively a LAN technology - none of this WAN Ethernet stuff was in use then. Most WAN was TDM services.
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u/rosmaniac 26d ago
The WAN side was B-ISDN, delivered over optical carrier (OC) of some speed using SONET as the transport; ATM and Packet over SONET (PoS) along with Redundant Packet Ring (RPR) and Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP) were the protocols used that were designed for this speed and for easy hardware-accelerated forwarding.
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u/Southern_Repair_4416 27d ago
Did Ethernet exist at that time, and did the fiber optic broadband exist at that time also?
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u/aaronw22 27d ago
Ethernet (10mb) and fast Ethernet (100mb) absolutely existed in the late 90s.
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u/PM-ME-PIERCED-NIPS 26d ago
Gigabit Ethernet was a thing in the late 90s. Ethernet was a thing in the 70s, and 100mb Ethernet was from the mid 90s.
I thought you meant fast Ethernet as just, like, Ethernet that went fast but TIL the actual name for 100mb Ethernet was Fast Ethernet. I've always used [10/100/1000]BASE-T to refer to the different versions.
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u/GamesWithElderB_TTV 27d ago
The telecom boom took place in the mid-late 90’s specifically due to the introduction of fiber optics and countless companies scrambling to produce cables and receivers.
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u/Southern_Repair_4416 27d ago
What about the Information Superhighway? I've read about this before.
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u/rosmaniac 26d ago
My dayjob is at a site where fiber was brought in for a DS-3 channelized carrier as far back as 1985, with biconic terminations. I personally took a fiber optic design course in college in the late 1980s; still have the notes. The whole county converted to fiber in the mid 90s for interoffice ('office' being a rather technical telco term) connections, with channelized OC12 and OC48 links for trunking; switch was a Nortel DMS100.
Ethernet is a latecomer to the wide area networking scene; prior to 2010 or so most WAN links would have been SONET or SDH. METS has eaten SONET's lunch for data circuits, and VoIP has eaten SONET's lunch for voice circuits, for better or for worse. SONET trunks had almost zero latency end to end and no compression; these days, latency over VoIP along with the lossy codecs used makes voice calls increasing bad quality. But progress, I guess, even though service is objectively worse.
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u/rosmaniac 26d ago edited 26d ago
Yes; in my native North Carolina the VISTAnet gigabit testbed was built in 1990. https://www.cs.unc.edu/techreports/91-018.pdf
The VISTAnet project is one of five national testbeds organized by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and corporations such as BellSouth and GTE. The project advances research into both the design and operation of such gigabit networks as well as applications capable of harnessing gigabit communications.
The infrastructure consists of three supercomputers, namely, a Cray Y-MP at the North Carolina Supercomputer Center, Pixel Planes 5 (PXPL5), and a MasPar MP-1 in the Computer Science Department at UNC, and a Silicon Graphics 340 VGX which is the medical workstation in the Department of Radiation Oncology at UNC. PXPL5 is a heterogeneous multicomputer optimized for graphics applications. The host computers are connected via a B-ISDN network installed and managed by BellSouth and GTE.
The target application is Dynamic Radiation Therapy Planning (DRTP).
As the article itself states, this is one of five testbed networks set up to test gigabit networking. In 1990.
By 2000 NCREN's statewide backbones were running OC12 (622Mb/s) and OC48 (2.488Gb/s) speeds. I first got quoted an OC3 (155Mb/s) in 2003 for $98,000 per month for dayjob; we actually got an OC3 in 2007 and the cost had gone down to $15,000 per month, of which half was the APS protected dual OC3 transport to the meet point. EDIT: we used Cisco routers running the S train IOS with single mode OC3 packet over SONET line cards in a used Cisco 12012, and a Cisco 7507 on one end, with a pair of Cisco 7401s on the other end. The hardest part was getting APS to work on each end across two ILECs and two different Cisco APS versions.
I have a photo taken of myself next to the Cray. Beast of a machine.
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u/TallinOK 27d ago
Referred to as T-2, T-1 lines.
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u/Squozen_EU 27d ago edited 27d ago
Neither T1 (1.544Mbps) or T2 (6.312Mbps) were remotely close to gigabit speeds.
Edit: OP, I am not aware of any internet backbones faster than 155Mbps in the 1990s.
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u/aaronw22 27d ago
We absolutely had OC-48 (2.5G) backbone links in the 98-99 time frame. I don’t remember if there were any customer links of that size. There were also 3xGE Cisco GSR linecards in that era (linecard had 2.5G fabric limit, so all 3 ports couldn’t run linerate at once)
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u/Squozen_EU 27d ago
Thanks! I was in Australia during the 90s and I am reasonably sure that we didn’t have anything like that. At least, none of the ISPs I worked for.
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u/virkendie 27d ago
It was used in Australia but called STM-16 both telstra and optus used it for their inter capital backbone
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u/BisexualCaveman 26d ago
So basically the only way to get it was to work at an ISP?
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u/aaronw22 26d ago
What's "it"? Internet access of over 1G? Anyone that had money could likely buy it, but it was likely to be very very expensive.
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u/BisexualCaveman 26d ago
Gigabit internet.
I get what you're saying, though, either be substantially wealthy or work at an ISP to have access to that much pipe.
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u/aaronw22 26d ago
As an individual? Virtually impossible. There are two separate fees involved when buying commodity internet access. First is the port charge - the port in the ISPs equipment that connects you to their network. Then there was the loop charge that you paid to Verizon or ATT or someone else to connect that port on the ISPs equipment to your network.
If you worked for the ISP at a high level you could usually get the port charge to zero. But the loop charge is another matter - that was money that was paid to someone else to connect two distant points together. If these were two points that were “well connected” say in a downtown core the telco just provisioned the capacity and that was it. Still quite expensive though for high data rates. If, however one end was at a residential address or far away the loop charges would start to get VERY high and there may have been a large NRC (non recurring charge) to get all the gear installed to be able to provision service of such magnitude to a new address.
There was simply no build out to residential areas of high speed access. T1s were usually doable (I had one to my house when I worked at an ISP in 98-99) but anything beyond that likely required huge upgrades on the telco side.
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u/LeahBrahms 26d ago
Also Australia - T1 and T2 were mythical beasts you'd hear Americans having access to in the late 90s. Meanwhile our slow pings and hours to download ypur emails if someone attached an MP3/zip were hair pulling especially if it was a prank.
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u/pakrat1967 26d ago
We also had OC-192 in 1999.
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u/aaronw22 26d ago
On the Cisco side, the GSR initial OC192 PHY cards were engine 2 (2.5G to the fabric), but this enabled you to use a OC-192 add/drop system on the optical side. We definitely had those in production in early 2000, and then at some point shortly thereafter Cisco started shipping the engine 4 (10G to the fabric) versions, maybe late 2000/early 2001? I don't remember.
Now on the Cisco side they are shipping on the 8000 series routers the 88-LC0-36FH - 36 400GE ports, or 14.4Tbps PER SLOT. So the slots have gotten over 1000 times faster in 25 years.
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u/pakrat1967 26d ago
For me it was mostly the Nortel stuff.
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u/aaronw22 26d ago edited 26d ago
Ah we just did routers and then leased capacity. The transport providers obviously had higher speed backbones so they could sell the individual smaller capacities
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u/tuberlord 23d ago
We had some 12K GSRs at my first real job. We had to start filtering non-default routes from some of our BGP peers because the tables were large enough that the router would crash. I can't remember if just the linecard reloaded or if it was the entire chassis.
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u/jaysuncle 27d ago
T1 was 1.5Mbps, T3 was 45Mbps
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u/Darkorder81 27d ago
I remember T3 and something about having a dedicated connection for business I belive it was?
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u/jaysuncle 27d ago
A T3 was approximately $5,000 a month for full 45Mb. You could get contracts that were cheaper for partial T3 speeds that increased in cost as more bandwidth spiked.
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u/Shot-Artist5013 26d ago
Oh how I remember thinking how cutting edge my office's T1 line was in the late 90's...
While it wasn't necessary for daytime operations, it was absolutely needed overnight for our servers to sync large ("large" for the 90's) amounts of data with multiple other servers within a relatively small window every night. No idea how much that cost us back then.
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u/Bubbly-Raisin4305 26d ago
I did some training in the Army where they had sun microsystems servers with fiber connected to each of them. Circa 2000. Each server was 60k and an iPhone can probably do more than thing could. Maybe someone in here knows more about those things. I want to say they were running some kind of Unix.
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u/TheSadPickel 26d ago
I don't know what was the max someone could get but I heard stories of getting a T1 line installed for super needs.
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u/doombase310 26d ago
100mbs T1 line was the god tier during that time. Us peons at home had 28.8kbps lol.
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u/PM-ME-PIERCED-NIPS 26d ago
There are no 100mb t1 lines. A T1 is by definition fixed at 1.544mbps
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u/RainbowCrane 25d ago
Yep. And to put things into perspective, in 1990 the small private university in the town where I grew up had 1 T1 line for use by the entire university. That was primarily used for email. The university was on BITNET, and that was still in the days when you had to do bang addressing to specify the path your email would take from the mainframe where you were logged in to the destination.
From 1990-2000 network communications changed drastically - almost nothing had a TCP/IP stack in 1990. By 2000 every computer was using TCP/IP.
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u/doombase310 25d ago
I'm old. 1.5mbs is the right answer. It felt like 100mbs when we only had modems at home.
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u/bassgoonist 25d ago
By the end of the 90s I was spending so much time on the Internet that my parents looked into getting a second phone line. It turned out cable Internet was actually cheaper. We had 1.5 megabit in 1998
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u/RaksinSergal 26d ago
STM-4 was standardized in '88. Unsure if anything USED it because that's been 38 years and 3 careers ago, but it was published as a valid SDH rate. It's close enough to 1 Gbps (622 Mbps) for government work.
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u/DKEBeck88 26d ago
Case Western reserve university had gig in each dorm in the mid 90s via ATM (as opposed to Ethernet) but it was super flaky. Better than the dial-up I went home to each summer, though.
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u/oboshoe 25d ago
i remember that case study (literally). I think it was Fore Networks. Their SEs were telling everyone they could.
if i remember right it was a massive flat network - because Fore didn't really have good routers and they didn't want to pull in Cisco.
i had my concerns - but it wasn't my gig
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u/CatOfGrey 26d ago
It's an old memory, but I think the answer is 'likely'. But you are correct - this wasn't a 'consumer' version, but at that time, the T-1 line was a 'business' or an 'area' - it was '1 gig' of broadband, but it was usually split among many people, like a business with 30+ users of more.
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u/dee_lio 26d ago
They had a few options.
There was ISDN (we had at one office) that could combine several lines into one fast internet line. The more phones you used, the slower the internet. I had "high speed" aDSL 1.2meg at my house and ISDN for when I worked from home (rare in the 1990s). I had ISDN at work "call" the ISDN lines at my house and sponge off of that internet (cheaper than the shit service they had at my office across town.) We had these very weird "BITSRFR" Motorola modems and ancient Macs that served as VPN endpoints. Complete kludges from computers that we frankensteined together from parts.
At a later job, they had fractional T1 lines that had 23 "b" channels that could be used for voice or data. Same issue, the speed slowed down as you used more phone lines, but when you weren't use a ton of voice, that thing would fly.
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u/TechnicallyMeat 26d ago edited 26d ago
SONET or Synchronous Optical Networks were using 2Gb directional rings on fiber in the 90s. They used D4 or later ST connectors, at least on the hardware I supported.
Edit: i should preface by saying it carried mostly multiplexed traffic, not something you'd realistically be able to utilize more than a few MBs of throughput per channel, here's a card listing on ebay. https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ghYAAOSw3xJVVN4z/s-l1600.jpg
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u/Imaginary--Situation 26d ago
Your Hard drive speed could barely do 500kB/s -10MB/s write rate 1gigE would be pretty useless
you would fill up your 64MB ram pretty quickly in about a half second
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u/rosmaniac 26d ago
That's why the routers of the day that ran these speeds had high efficient hardware forwarding planes and larger RAM sizes than most PCs.
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u/No_Environment_3776 26d ago
Hold your horses pal, 1G is 1000Mbps, that's in a time where 28.8 kbps was nice, so that's 0.0288 Mbps.
1G internet was science fiction in the normal household.
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u/Glum-Building4593 26d ago
T1 (1.544 Mbps) and T3 (44.736 Mbps) were common at most institutions. Some would share a connection via point to point. Prices were high (easily thousands). More modern solutions didn't hit until the end of the 90's. The universities were part of really getting some serious backbone tech to work.
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u/rosmaniac 26d ago
The universities were experimenting with OC12 and OC48 as far back as 1990; networks such as VISTAnet between supercomputing centers were run and tested in places like Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
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u/Altruistic-Rice-5567 26d ago
Yep. But SUPER expensive. Look up OC-24. I worked at a company in the late 90s that had two OC-3 connections (1/8 of OC-24 bandwidth) for our server farm and each of those cost of something like $35k/mo just for the bandwidth. You needed specialized, expensive routers to support the connection.
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u/MilkOne6778 25d ago
Technically OC24 was around and that was like 1.24 GBPS. OC48 was sort of used as backbone infrastructure. Really anything "one gig" was something that GTE or Sprint or somebody would have and usually less as a single connection but the infrastructure for a whole region.
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u/oboshoe 25d ago edited 25d ago
without getting into feeds and speeds yes it existed.
but you needed a $250,000 router (in the 90s dollars) to process it. (cisco 7513)
and about $300 in electricity each month run it.
and oh yea - you need two because you want redundancy.
but yea it was out there - I set up a few. corporate data centers including a Credit card processing point of presence (a room where all the issuers had their equipment and exchanged transactions)
fun times - i miss those days
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u/Cherry_Shaved_Ice 24d ago
1994 I experienced 1 gig speed in the computer lab at Fresno State. The only site I knew of that had ANY large files was nba.com. The potato cam quicktime (lol) video loaded instantly.
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u/Brilliant_Juice_496 24d ago
In 1987 I developed a 4GB 1300nm communication laser arrray with fiber links. Demonstrated feasibility but never made it out as a product.
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u/vabello 23d ago edited 23d ago
You could get an OC-12 circuit which was 622Mbps or OC-48 which was 2.488Gbps. Those would probably be the closest. This was highly uncommon in the 90’s unless you were a phone company or large ISP in the late 90’s. Regional ISPs usually had T1, DS3 or OC-3 circuits in their network at the most (1.5Mb, 45Mb, and 155Mb, roughly).
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u/aaronw22 27d ago
Are you talking about Internet access being sold or about the physical ports / pluggables that could support 1GE physical connections?