1987-90: Open systems and Star performers
In 1987 the computer population of Ireland was visibly on the rise, but data communications services were clearly underdeveloped.
The personal computer revolution was in full swing. Thousands of small businesses were now accustomed to running PCs with spreadsheets, word processing software and accounting packages to record their sales and purchases. Larger organisations with minicomputers or mainframes were installing PCs beside, or in place of, older terminals. There was also a small, but distinct band of computer hobbyists with their own online meeting places and software sharing practices.
Anyone who wanted to connect computers in different locations had to deal with the state-owned telecommunications company, Telecom Eireann. It had always treated voice telephony as its core business, but more and more computer-generated traffic was flowing across its networks. In 1987 Telecom offered three options for data transmission – leased lines, a national packet switching service and dial-up modem connections through the public telephone network. None were easy to set up.
National authorities like Telecom Eireann were increasingly subject to European Commission regulations and directives, especially in the emerging market for ‘value added’ network services. Further challenges to monopolies and restrictive practices in telecommunications would follow.
The business computing scene also looked set for radical change. Vendor-independent ‘open systems’ and industry standards were on the rise. These promised to reduce the costs of running a computer installation by lowering its dependencies on individual system makers and their proprietary technologies. The Unix operating system was the centrepiece of this movement, even though it came in different versions that had their own idiosyncrasies and were never fully compatible.
Computing professionals with strong technical reputations tended to be Unix advocates. Some of the country’s best known software developers were active in the Irish Unix Users Group (IUUG), which started to offer international networking services to its members in 1987.
The open systems philosophy was beginning to encroach on telecommunications through the TCP/IP suite of protocols, which advanced in the wake of Unix. The purpose of this software was to ensure reliable data transmissions among disparate host computers. Starting in 1988, a small number of installations in Ireland used TCP/IP to link their Unix machines with other systems.
Put simply, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was a transport layer that established and managed data connections, while the Internet Protocol (IP) was a network layer that provided addressing, routing and other network-to-network functionality.
By this time the National Science Foundation in the US had adopted TCP/IP and there was a growing interest in using it to establish an ‘electronic mail internet’ across America’s academic and research networks.
The conventional wisdom, though, was that TCP/IP was just a temporary fix. Computing and telecommunications experts alike argued that true openness would be achieved through a different model – Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) – that carried the imprimaturs of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Telecommunication Union. The European Commission frequently stitched OSI specifications into its cross-border research programmes and standardisation projects.
TCP/IP was supposed to wither away as OSI matured.
Back in Ireland there were clear signs of a latent demand for online services. Clusters of partners in the same lines of business – including travel agents, freight transporters, farmers, insurance providers, pharmacists and librarians – were exchanging more and more data. Academics who could access the Higher Education Authority’s HEAnet network, had also discovered the benefits of inter-university and international email. Computer user associations were introducing email services for members. Students and computer hobbyists had set up bulletin board systems.
Ireland, however, lagged behind other countries in the adoption of network services. In 1987 the European Commission introduced its Special Telecommunications Action for Regional development (Star) programme – a catch-up measure that subsidised technological projects in Europe’s ‘less favoured regions’. Its methodology was very flexible. Each of the participating states devised its own way of investing the funds that came from Brussels.
Ireland would receive €50 million from Star. Most of this money was spent on the underlying infrastructure. But the programme also tried to stimulate demand for the OSI-powered ‘advanced telecommunications services’ that the Commission was encouraging through other actions.
Star would assist new service providers to get off the ground, using technologies like electronic data interchange (EDI) and videotex. It tried to co-ordinate online access to business and tourism information. It expanded the data communications horizons of government departments and state agencies. And it introduced communities outside the major cities to distance working and videoconferencing.
The information gateways and industry-specific initiatives supported by Star were generally short-lived. But they succeeded in raising the level of awareness of online services in financial institutions, tourism, publishing, manufacturing, distribution and the public service. They also gave many computer users in Ireland their first online experiences.
Star’s pilot projects and local demonstrations paved the way for the following generation of online services – services that would be less expensive and more widely accessible. The internet services of the 1990s.
1991: ‘A complete connection can be achieved in a matter of days’
It was probably inevitable that Ireland’s first direct connection to the internet would involve a university. Academic and research networks were evolving rapidly throughout Europe. The growing demand for TCP/IP was a major issue at meetings of the RARE and EARN associations of European research networks, while the Cosine project was ramping up their international connectivity.
Trinity College Dublin installed a leased line to a network operations centre in Amsterdam in June 1991. This connection would not only enable college staff to access the internet. Trinity had also agreed to share the link with a start-up campus company, IEunet, which intended to sell online services to customers outside the university. The founders of IEunet had previously provided store-and-forward email and other information services to the IUUG on a voluntary basis. Their new business would establish a professional relationship with the Unix association in collaboration with the European Unix Network (EUnet).
Ireland’s first internet service provider (ISP) had arrived.
Launched in 1982 as an international, though informal, network that linked thousands of Unix systems, EUnet built up its services with Unix-specific communications software. By 1991 it could also deliver internet connections. The network was also turning commercial, forming a new company in the Netherlands with the EUnet name.
The evolution of EUnet mirrored recent developments in the United States, where several internet backbones now existed. The dominant one, controlled by the National Science Foundation, was strictly for research and educational purposes. Other backbones, however, were privately owned and not subject to the same rules. Some were willing to sell their spare capacity. UUNET, for example, had launched a commercial internet service called AlterNet in 1990. UUNET was the American equivalent of EUnet.
The newly commercial version of EUnet planned to manage a central network and to appoint organisations in individual countries to sell its services. IEunet was one of the first national partners.
The campus company’s sales brochure announced the availability of a central node for communication between ‘national and international members’. It also assured potential users that ‘With careful planning and reasonable technical ability a complete connection can be achieved in a matter of days’.
IEunet’s early customers were expected to sign a declaration that they would not exploit the internet for commercial purposes. This requirement originated in an agreement between the company and the IUUG. But it also masked the commercial dimension of its operations – a shrewd precaution in the days before the existence of an official licensing scheme for Irish service providers.
Only a handful of network administrators, academics and Unix enthusiasts were aware of the arrival of the internet in Ireland. Some of the Star-subsidised projects were, in contrast, attracting significant attention and a follow-up European Commission programme, Telematique, was getting underway.
1991 also saw a battle for transaction processing contracts between two state-owned companies. Eirtrade was part of Telecom Eireann. PostGem, a subsidiary of the national postal authority, was one of the major beneficiaries of the Star programme. These competitors enabled rival supermarket groups to offer EDI links to their suppliers. Both sold email services based on OSI standards. Both targeted trade associations and professional bodies as prospective customers.
The Star-supported initiative with the highest profile was the Minitel videotex system. 1991 was never meant to be the year of the internet. It was supposed to mark the dawn of Minitel in Ireland.
France provided the role model. The country had distinguished itself in the 1980s by establishing a mass medium for online information retrieval. Minitel users with small-screen terminals could access pages of text and very simple graphics from all sorts of content providers. The most popular application in France was an online version of the telephone directory.
AIB Group, Credit Lyonnais, France Telecom and Telecom Eireann formed a consortium to build an equivalent infrastructure in Ireland. There had been earlier attempts to deliver videotex services in this country, but Minitel’s ecosystem approach was something new. It went live in 1991 after three years of feasibility studies and technical trials. It soon became apparent, however, that few information providers in Ireland would commit resources to this ecosystem until they saw a critical mass of users. And that never materialised.
The Telematique programme issued its first call for proposals in January 1992. This attracted more than 400 outline submissions – a level of demand for funding that was about 20 times greater than the available budget.
1992-94: Service on a shoestring
IEunet grew steadily, but not spectacularly, after its launch. It attracted about 40 customers by mid-1992 and added another 100 organisations to this base over the next two years. Internet usage also increased in the universities, facilitated by the HEAnet service.
The non-academic internet was mainly a Dublin phenomenon until 1994. IEunet’s only access point was in the capital and the costs of dialling in from other parts of the country dampened demand for its service. But the pace of internet adoption picked up in the second half of 1994 after IEunet teamed up with regional partners in Galway, Cork and the midwest and opened local dial-in facilities. These and other start-up ISPs drew in hundreds of new user organisations.
This first generation of service providers talked up the many capabilities of the TCP/IP infrastructure, including its online discussion groups, file transfer capabilities and downloadable software. But the primary reason why people signed up for internet access was because they wanted electronic mail. In 1995, indeed, an international study reported that less than ten per cent of the worldwide internet community used any service other than email. The proportion in Ireland was probably in line with everywhere else.
Internet messaging had clear advantages over services based on the X.400 specification from the OSI model. The internet addressing scheme was far easier to handle. The mail software for client machines was mostly free and could often be downloaded from a file server. And the day-to-day costs of sending and receiving messages were much, much lower.
For a time it seemed that OSI and the internet would evolve in parallel. For example, there were initiatives on both fronts to develop user directories for Ireland. The TCD computer science department created and maintained a database of X.400 mail users in Ireland, while a UCD campus company was established to run the IE Domain Registry of internet users.
The alternative sets of communication protocols carried different cultural and political connotations. TCP/IP had originated in North America, where IT standards were often established through winner-takes-all contests among big corporations. OSI, on the other hand, was rooted in a European tradition of standards setting by technical committees and intergovernmental co-operation.
The Irish software industry gravitated towards the OSI camp. Development firms like Baltimore Technologies, Euristix, Isocor, Retix and SSE accumulated OSI knowledge and experience. Building products based on industry standards was, indeed, a proven success strategy for software companies in Ireland with global ambitions.
At the international level, however, network administrators were increasingly impatient with the limitations and costliness of OSI applications. Most significantly perhaps, the academic and research networks, which were usually the innovators in computer connectivity, no longer wished to follow the OSI roadmaps. They were now drawing up plans for a Europe-wide internet backbone instead.
The first generation of non-academic ISPs in Ireland operated on a shoestring. None of these businesses were headed by experienced entrepreneurs. Most of the founders had technical backgrounds and preferred configuring network equipment to writing business plans.
Unlike IEunet, outfits like Ireland On-Line, Internet Eireann, Connect Ireland and Genesis Project Ireland (later known as Eirenet), did not come from university computer installations or from the technical user groups. Their interests were closer to those of computer hobbyists, games enthusiasts and community organisations. They were persistently underfunded and often relied on students to keep their operations running.
In most cases they raised just enough money to pay for capacity on one of the growing number of telecommunications pipelines out of Ireland and to install a switch for customers to dial into. If and when their revenues were sufficient, they invested in additional equipment and more bandwidth. They improvised and innovated in order to continue trading.
Awareness of computer communications was now rising in the wider community. Network infrastructure had even started to feature in political rhetoric around the globe. The 1992 Clinton-Gore election campaign in the US included talk of ‘information highways’ and the Bangemann report on ‘Europe and the Global Information Society’ in 1994 set a similar agenda for the European Union. Because of a fuzziness in the terminology, the internet could be construed as the main road for data traffic or merely an access route to some future superhighway. Either way it was a hot topic at international summit meetings.
Irish government departments were slower to embrace the internet than their counterparts elsewhere – a source of constant frustration for the local ISPs. The Department of Finance ran a Central Information Technology Service that actively discouraged other departments from connecting to the internet. Some politicians were prodded online with assistance from the universities. But no government minister acquired an internet email address until 1995.
The email-centred chapter of the internet story ended with the arrival of the World Wide Web.
Some users began to explore the web in 1994, when browser performance over dial-up connections was still too slow and too erratic for practical purposes. It was obvious, however, that this new medium had tremendous potential. In December 1994 Netscape Communications released its Navigator browser, bringing stability to web technology and unleashing that potential. The ISPs responded by offering web space and support as part of their customer packages or by partnering with specialist web designers and consultancies.
Some of the early web enthusiasts in Ireland were very good at raising awareness of the new medium and demonstrating what it could do. Middleware developer Iona Technologies – which, like IEunet, had begun as a TCD campus company – was among the first firms anywhere to use a web site for product promotion.
It was not long before marketing agencies discovered the web. Once that happened, a more commercially-minded breed of ISP arrived on the scene. And no one would ever again portray the internet as a not-for-profit environment.
1995-96: Money talks and market share matters
The second generation of internet service providers that appeared in Ireland during 1995 was far better resourced than the earlier companies. They brought commercial experience into the industry and knew how to devise and implement business plans.
Internet Services Ireland (ISI) was backed by Sun’s Irish distributor and used different trading names to target businesses and households. So did Medianet, which originated in the advertising industry and aspired to build an online audience for marketeers. Internet Exchange’s founders had experience in web site design and running Ireland’s first internet café. Indigo invested in an elaborate infrastructure capable of supporting large numbers of users and web sites before it signed up a single customer. The company was initially controlled by a family whose apparent wealth was the subject of much speculation among its rivals.
These ISPs were more like traders than crusaders. They were spending money now to make more money at a future date. Market share was all-important. And they announced deals with big name customers as if they were winning sports trophies.
By the middle of the decade people with little or no computing experience were setting up internet accounts. Alternatively they could join easy-to-use international services like America Online and CompuServe that offered members-only online environments. Apple’s short-lived eWorld information service was the first of these to open an access node in Ireland.
Meanwhile, the non-internet services fostered by Star and Telematique quietly petered out. Eirtrade and PostGem both announced internet access options for their existing customers and started to phase out their OSI-based services. Eirtrade also took over the remnants of the Minitel system in 1995.
In the following year the EDI Association of Ireland dropped ‘EDI’ from its name and relaunched itself as the Electronic Commerce Association of Ireland. This reflected the gradual reconfiguring of the specialist services for insurance brokers, legal practices and travel agents so that they would run over the internet.
The OSI model itself soon faded away and its protocol wars against TCP/IP were forgotten – except, perhaps, among those software professionals who had chosen OSI as their career strategy. Some of Ireland’s software development companies, however, soon embraced the internet by adding web capabilities to their products.
By December 1995 more than 20 companies had launched internet access services in Ireland or announced plans to join the industry. These included Telecom Eireann, MCI and Sprint, which provided wholesale connectivity for ISPs instead of delivering front-end services to users. In total the country’s internet service providers were utilising just over 5 Mbps of international bandwidth at the end of 1995. Twelve months later this figure had increased to 18 Mbps. HEAnet held the biggest share, accounting for 4 Mbps of this capacity.
By now large enterprises, small firms and residential users could select internet service providers that catered for their different wants and expectations. The competition for small businesses and home computer users was particularly intense, focused on aggressive pricing rather than on the quality of service. The ISPs offered flat monthly charges or generous trial periods. They published their own internet connectivity kits with step-by-step signing up instructions for new users and distributed these packs through retail outlets.
These trends became visible to all during the pre-Christmas marketing season in 1995. Electrical appliance shops bundled web browsers with multimedia PCs. Bookstores and video rental shops stacked their shelves with ISP kits. Newspaper advertisements urged non-users to discover the internet and one of the new service providers ran a billboard campaign that started with teaser slogans and only revealed the company’s identity at a later date.
The heightened competition hurt the weaker players. During 1996 Internet Eireann and Eirenet closed down. The consortium behind ISI bought EUnet Ireland (previously known as IEunet) and merged the companies under the EUnet name. PostGem assumed control of Ireland On-Line later in the year.
In the midst of all this volatility a row erupted over the first attempt to provide an interconnection point inside Ireland for the service providers – and thus to reduce the volume and expense of international data transfers. It floundered when one of the service providers, PostGem, assumed responsibility for managing the switch. Other ISPs opted out and formulated plans for a genuinely independent exchange.
Internet users were also looking for ways to reduce their costs. Most were still relying on dial-up modems to access the nearest connection point and many had to pay for these calls at cross-country, rather than local, rates. By the end of 1996, however, Ireland On-Line and Telecom Internet, a new business unit inside Telecom Eireann, both offered local connectivity throughout Ireland.
The civil service belatedly accepted the internet in 1996 and commissioned HEAnet to provide access and support. The academic network service, indeed, had quietly grown into Ireland’s largest internet service provider. HEAnet was subsequently restructured and transferred its operations to a limited liability company.
1997: The end of the beginning
The recently-formed Irish Internet Association (IIA) conducted a survey in 1997, collecting 2,346 replies to a questionnaire on its web site. These enabled the organisation to draw up its first profile of online activity in Ireland.
According to the respondents, slow access and security concerns were the most critical issues for the internet. Most users were now able to connect from their homes. More than 90 per cent accessed news and product information on the web. Some 40 per cent had made multiple online purchases. More than half said that they would not be willing to pay for information on the internet.
Just six years after the formation of IEunet, clear trends in internet access, user habits and attitudes had taken hold. These trends would prevail well into the 21st century.
The internet was now perceived to be a communications medium rather than a set of standards for data networking. Furthermore, it was rapidly evolving to accommodate a diverse audience. Just one throwback to earlier and geekier times was apparent in the IIA survey. Almost a quarter of the replies came from people who held computer-related jobs.
Another indicator of the state of the internet was the composition of the IIA itself. The new association claimed to represent the interests of ‘those doing business on the internet’. Some of its members came from the ISPs and from web site development firms. But sales and marketing specialists were also prominent.
Internet access was turning into a commodity and the mainstream telecommunications industry was circling the ISPs. The pioneers of the Irish internet, who had come from a very different culture, were no longer the leaders in service provision and were finally eclipsed in 1997.
Two noteworthy omens had appeared towards the end of the previous year. The first was inside Telecom Eireann, where Telecom Internet gradually absorbed Eirtrade with little fuss or publicity. The second was Esat Telecom’s announcement of plans for a business-oriented internet service called EasyNet. This group had become Telecom’s strongest competitor in long distance and international telephony.
Such statements of intent by large enterprises worried the independent ISPs.
They resolved their disagreements over interconnection in 1997. The Internet Neutral Exchange (INEX) went live in April under independent management. The new switch initially routed national internet traffic among EUnet Ireland, HEAnet, Indigo and Telecom Internet. PostGem gave up its ambitions to run an alternative exchange and joined INEX later that summer.
Despite the EasyNet announcement, it soon became evident that Esat did not intend to grow an internet service from the bottom up. It wanted to invest in an established provider and it was able to raise finance on a scale unthinkable for any of the existing ISPs. In November Esat secured $78 million through an initial public offering. Just days later the group announced that it had purchased EUnet Ireland. It renamed the business Esat Net, describing the acquired company as ‘the largest provider of internet solutions to the corporate market in Ireland’. Esat bought another sizeable chunk of that market in 1999, when it hoovered up PostGem and the not-so-corporate Ireland On-Line customer base.
Indigo also changed hands. Esat attempted to acquire it, but it was Telecom Eireann that took over the company in November 1997. Medianet and Internet Ireland remained autonomous for a while longer. Via Net.Works, an international internet and electronic commerce company, bought Medianet in October 1999. Three months later Princes Holdings, which was part-owned by Independent Newspapers, purchased Internet Ireland.
Corporate interests controlled the Irish internet, setting the stage for an e-business bubble and the brief, but raucous, careers of wildly ambitious commercial ventures that became known as ‘dot coms’.
The internet was was still young, but the time of the trailblazers was over.
Last edit: June 2024
© TechArchives 2024