I’m surprised how little the histories of the web include the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL, the technology that made computer networks easy to expand to every house, and the general idea that the Internet could be a domestic technology. Until the late 80s, the Internet was a military and gradually academic tool, but even until the mid-90s, having an internet connection at home was quaint outside of France where accessing your official records, buying certain things online was a convenient reality. TCP/IP and Tier 1 networks were only one half of the story, and the far smaller, easier half: connecting every country is a matter of a few big projects; connecting everyone is something, that to this day, many still struggle with.
There’s an occasional mention of Cepremades as an inspiration for the Internet Protocol, some technicality about Alohanet, but never a history of why that should be in everyone’s living room, except a mysterious prescient and unhelpful AOL, their omnipresent CD, and nothing about the government-sponsored, centralised project to make cheap modulator-demodulator use long copper wires — something that proved both incredibly difficult and relevant.
> I’m surprised how little the histories of the web include the contribution of the French tech sector for DSL
Do you mean for digital technologies or for specifically DSL?
As I remember up to 1996 there was no commercial DSL in France, but there were excellent ISDN coverage (with rate up to 128kbits/sec with two channels). However it was quite expensive and when DSL was commercialized in France, it was cheaper at the basic rate of 512Kbits/sec.
ISDN commercialization started around 1988 in France.
In 1996 the Network part of FT started to think how to open the network to higher bandwidth, and it was not so easy because the internal backbone was built on ATM as it was used by Minitel users.
Some years later (2002?) with declining Minitel revenues, FT decided to give the priority to DSL, with an adequate IP backbone.
(Source: It's only from my memories, I was involved in Rennes' 1987 ISDN experiment, network organization in 96-98 and commercialization of ISDN and later DSL, in Brittany, from 1998 to 2002)
regarding ATM and DSL - A lot of setups in Europe apparently used PPPoA, not PPPoE, meaning your DSL line integrated easily with the ATM network on the backbone from my understanding.
Thanks,
In France it started with PPPoA, yet quickly it moved to PPPoE (~1999).
People indeed used PCs not minitels to connect to the new thing of the time (Internet). At the time there was a need to update PCs as most individual or family customers had Windows 98.
My experience is that it added instabilities to PC with Win98 where if I remember correctly PPPoE worked out of the box with Win2K and WinXP (it's was a long time ago).
Anyway most home PCs of the time where not to able to deal with the speed of ADSL. I remember that the owner of a restaurant in Rennes wanted us to pay them a new PC!
While PPPoE worked on WinXP, driver support when transitioning to XP was quite a big issue for some.
I still remember hacking the inf files to get my modem work on it as an early adopter.
Well, you're right that the Minitel was more easily obtainable, but there WERE CompuServe, Prodigy, and other private services in the US before the Internet took off. Those had some pretty large subscriber bases; nothing like now, of course.
There’s an occasional mention of Cepremades as an inspiration for the Internet Protocol, some technicality about Alohanet, but never a history of why that should be in everyone’s living room, except a mysterious prescient and unhelpful AOL, their omnipresent CD, and nothing about the government-sponsored, centralised project to make cheap modulator-demodulator use long copper wires — something that proved both incredibly difficult and relevant.