AT&T WorldNet

» see worldnet.att.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

at&t worldnet was us-only at the carrier layer. you needed a us phone number plus an at&t long-distance account (or willingness to set one up). i was on ttnet in turkey from '98 onward, with a brief stretch on superonline before that, so worldnet was always a service i read about in pc magazine and computer shopper rather than something i could dial.

at&t launched the service on march 14 1996. the pitch was flat-rate consumer dial-up at $19.95 a month for unmetered hours, undercutting aol's $9.95 for five hours tariff at the time. ma bell's brand was the marketing weapon. millions of american households already had at&t long-distance accounts. worldnet shipped its client cd alongside the monthly long-distance bill, and the dial-up plan could be added as a line item.

peak around 1999, somewhere around 1.5 million subscribers. by then aol had passed twenty million on its own, and cable broadband was about to start taking the dial-up base for real.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the worldnet client cd was its own artifact. the software was a customized netscape navigator bundle plus an email client (at&t worldnet mail) plus a usenet reader, all wrapped in an at&t-branded installer. it ran on windows 95 and macos out of the box. the dial-up numbers were national, which mattered in the us because of how long-distance toll worked: most consumer isps in 1996 still routed through regional access numbers that could rack up toll charges if you dialed from the wrong area code.

worldnet's positioning was the boring-utility play against aol's keyword-and-walled-garden play. there was no aol-style content portal. you got a dialer with a usenet feed and an smtp/pop3 mailbox attached, plus an open connection to the real internet. for technical users this was a feature. for everyone else aol's prettier homepage and chat rooms felt more like a service.

~ the decline ~

the dial-up consumer-isp market crossed its plateau in 2000-2001. cable modems and dsl started filtering into american suburbs at $40-50 a month, double the dial-up price but ten times faster. aol's userbase peaked at 26.7 million in late 2002 and then started falling. worldnet's curve looked similar but shallower, because at&t never had aol's mainstream pull.

sbc communications acquired at&t in november 2005 for $16 billion and took the at&t name (sbc had been one of the regional bells spun out of the 1984 at&t breakup). the new at&t already had its own dsl business through the bell-south and pacific-bell footprints, and it rebranded consumer broadband as at&t yahoo! dsl in 2006 in partnership with yahoo. the worldnet dial-up service got folded into that as a legacy line. final migration ran between april 5 and april 15 2010.

~ what remains ~

the worldnet dial-up cd still floats around on ebay and in the basements of people who held onto their late-nineties internet starter kits, alongside the aol 1000 free hours discs and the netscape mail trial floppies. for a us household first getting online in 1996-97, worldnet was as common a starter isp as msn or prodigy. easier to forget because the at&t brand later got attached to so many other things.

also buried: the bundle. before broadband everything came on a cd in a cardboard sleeve and the isp shipped you a self-installer that configured your tcp/ip stack, your dialup connection, your browser, your mail client (anyway, often a usenet client too). that whole on-ramp moved to a six-step web wizard sometime around 2004 and has not existed since.

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