In clearing my drawers today, I found a quotation from Supernet sent to me in December 1994 about subscribing to its 256kbps Internet Dedicated Access. The installation charge was HK$55,000 quoted as follows:
HKT DDS leased line installation – HK$4,000
Supernet Dedicated Installation fee – HK$10,000
Router installation – HK$41,000
As for the monthly recurrent cost, it was charged at HK$45,900 a month made up as follows:
HKT DDS leased line rental – HK$5,900
Supernet Dedicated monthly rental – HK$40,000
That was not the end of the story. Supernet adopted a cap on monthly throughput of 8000 MB per month. If the quota was exceeded, user would be charged HK$8 per MB.
It should be noted that in the early days of Internet, routers and switches, firewall and other networking equipment were not highly reliable and the committed availability of Supernet was just 99 %. We all know that the Service Level Agreement used today always require the serving ISP to provide 99.9 or 99.95 % availability.
Looking back, I could not imagine how network administrators could have paid such high cost for Internet provisions and yet the services were not reliable. On top of that, how could they ensure that the maximum throughput was not exceeded. Of course, having said that, network administrators today have easier jobs as they can ask ISPs to provide the best possible services without worrying the bandwidth usage.
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