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Today, we celebrate 31 years since the World Wide Web was launched into the public domain. This marked the beginning of what we know today as content sharing – the moment when the internet really took off.
This was around the same time Eddy Barker joined AT&T. As a young engineer, Eddy knew the internet was about to change the world, and he wanted to be part of making that happen.
In those days, people connected to the internet through a dial-up modem. You would plug your computer to the modem, “call” the internet, and then, in about 30 seconds, you were connected. But Eddy knew that dial up internet would not be enough for the technological advancements that were about to come.
The maximum speed of the internet then was roughly 56 kbps. This meant downloading a web page could take several minutes. Downloading a song could take five minutes or more, and low-res video downloads were often an overnight project. And hopefully someone didn’t need to make a call during that download. The internet rode on a conventional telephone line. That means, you are either talking on the phone or you’re browsing on the internet – but never both at the same time.
Seeing the opportunity, Eddy and AT&T Labs engineers worked towards early trials of what would be called Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology. How does it work? His team engineered the internet to still ride on the same telephone line but would route telephone calls to the lower bandwidth and the internet to the higher bandwidth. For the first time, customers no longer needed to hang up the phone just to surf the internet. It was fast and always on. This didn’t just improve the existing experience but enabled entirely new economies and cultures.
Eddy led Southwestern Bell Telephone Company’s (SWBT) first DSL field trial in 1996. The trial not only pioneered the use of DSL at the home or the office but also became the very first implementation of virtual private networking.