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Comment by sg47 | Hacker News Reader

Can we try robocalling them to collect the remaining?

Makes me wonder how long distance rates are charged in the first place. A little OT but did we used to call websites?

In dialup, you (or your modem) would dial a POP server, or point-of-presence. That was a modem bank on one side, and Internet backbone link on the other, generally as a local call. The website was reached via the POP, but you could reach any website anywhere on the public Internet without having to dial up each individually.

More specifically, PSTN is a public, switched, telecommunications network, in which each communication occurs over a direct, and until recently physical, circuit. The "switches" refer to how those circuits are set up and broken down. By contrast the Internet is packet routed; each data packet is routed across the network by the best available route. Users don't have dedicated circuits (though there are dedicated addresses), but rather data from multiple communications is commingled on common transmission channels.

There were BBSes which you'd call directly (the job board DICE ws initially a BBS), but BBS != website. Similar in ways to today's SPAs though.

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1704/point-of-presence...

https://networkencyclopedia.com/point-of-presence-pop/

That's impressive how POP servers communicated across the Internet backbone considering some websites were long distance. I get to read about Erlang now. Carrier-grade NAT in regards to ip addresses reminds me of my grandparents had a shared phone-line for their neighborhood. It's funny you mentioned BBS, I think that's what I was initially unclear about. That answers many of my questions, ty for the time.

Clarifying: dialing the PoP was generally lpcal.

The backbone connectiin was TCP/IP, not PSTN. There are no distance charges, only bandwidth, generally at 95%ile peak "burstable" billing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing

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