Chapter 8 · 1994–today

The Ozarks get online

ORION was first, but it wasn't alone for long. The providers, prices and wires that replaced it.

The first commercial providers

Before ORION, getting on the Internet from Springfield mostly meant having an account at the university. Southwest Missouri State offered dial-in to its own people from around 1991.¹ By the mid-1990s local businesses were opening up shop, often run out of a storefront or a spare office with a rack of modems and a leased line.

Ozark Network Communications, OzNet for short, on South Holland Avenue, called itself "The Ozarks First Commercial Web Service Provider." In 1996 it served its sites from a Sun SPARCstation 2 over a T1, and it hosted the pages of the Ozarks Internet Users' Group, the club that started out as ORION's users' group.² DIALnet, on South Jefferson, sold full dial-up access in Springfield, Nixa, Ozark and Aurora from 1996. Panther Creek Information Services started out in Fordland, where its sign-up page told customers to "Take 60 Highway East from Springfield," and moved to Springfield by 1998.² ProTel Systems, in business since 1982, said it was the first in town to offer Internet over ISDN.²

The $19.95 era

The price that defined dial-up was set nationally. In December 1996 America Online dropped hourly charges and went to a flat $19.95 a month. Its lines jammed for months, and when AOL customers gave up, they called the local providers. DIALnet had to stop taking new customers in January 1997 until it could add 16 more lines.³

Locally, prices fell to meet AOL and then went under it. A list the users' group kept around 1997–98 shows DIALnet at $14.95 unlimited, Panther Creek at $19.95, Computerland at $18.95, and one provider listing a 7:1 ratio of customers to modems. OnThe.Net, on Park Central East, already had dial-in numbers in eleven towns from Bolivar to Neosho and was selling ADSL to businesses for $1,000 a month.^3, 4 ORION, on the same list, was free, text-only, and limited to seven counties.⁴

The fiber fight

Springfield had a fast network running under its streets before most of its homes had a modem. City Utilities had laid fiber for its own use, and in 1994 the City Council began studying whether it could sell the spare capacity. Southwestern Bell objected, and the argument went to Jefferson City. In July 1997 the governor signed House Bill 620, which barred City Utilities from selling its excess fiber to the public.^3, 6 City Utilities' SpringNet launched that year anyway, serving businesses and institutions.⁶ Homes would wait more than twenty years.

Cable

The end of dial-up as the normal way to get online in Springfield can be dated fairly closely. In December 1998 TCI announced its @Home cable modem service: a beta in February 1999, then a launch starting in southeast Springfield, at $39.95 a month plus $150 to install, with speeds up to 10 megabits per second. That was close to two hundred times a 56k modem, and TCI expected Springfield to be the first place in Missouri to get cable Internet.⁷ Six months later ORION switched off its last free modems.

The cable company changed hands almost as fast as the technology. TCI merged into AT&T in 1999, so TCI@Home became AT&T@Home. On June 29, 2001, AT&T Broadband sold its cable systems in Springfield, Columbia and Jefferson City to Mediacom.⁸ Meanwhile @Home itself, by then merged with the Excite portal as Excite@Home, had filed for bankruptcy that September. On November 30, 2001, a bankruptcy judge let it stop serving the cable companies, and many customers across the country lost their connections that weekend while their cable companies scrambled to build networks of their own.⁹ Cable Internet in Springfield went on under Mediacom's own name. A decade later it had a competitor, when AT&T brought its U-verse service to parts of Springfield in 2010.¹⁰

Fiber to every address

City Utilities had been laying fiber since the 1980s, first for its own use.¹¹ In 2019 it announced a $120 million plan to extend that network by more than 1,000 miles, past every address in Springfield. The model came from Huntsville, Alabama, where the city utility had built fiber and leased it to Google Fiber. City Utilities would build the network to the curb and lease it, on a long-term and non-exclusive basis, to a private company that would run the drops to houses and sell the service. The first tenant was CenturyLink, on a 15-year lease.^11, 12

Service began on the north side in July 2020 under CenturyLink's Quantum Fiber name, starting at $65 a month for a gigabit. In October 2022 CenturyLink's parent, Lumen, sold its local telephone business in Missouri and nineteen other states to a new company, Brightspeed, which took over the Springfield lease and its roughly 7,500 customers on the same terms.¹³ Today Brightspeed and Total Highspeed both sell service over City Utilities' fiber. The network a 1997 state law kept City Utilities from selling to the public now reaches every address in Springfield, with a private company's name on the bill.^13, 6

The network underneath

Through all of it, the state's research and education network, MOREnet, kept growing. It was formed in 1991 by 13 public colleges and universities so they could reach the national NSFnet. ORION started life on a MOREnet server, ran its chat on MOREnet's statewide network, and sold its hardware back to MOREnet when it closed. MOREnet is still running today.¹⁴

In 1994, ORION's link from Springfield to Columbia was a single 56K line, the same speed MOREnet's whole backbone had been three years before. Missouri State turned off its own campus dial-up for good on December 31, 2011.¹