InfoVía

~ the goodbye ~

i came online from home in Turkey in 1998, on a dial-up account and a modem that had to be talked into it. That same year Spain switched off the thing that had been standing between Spanish households and the internet since 1995. i have no memory of InfoVía and no way to have one. It belongs on this site because it is the cleanest surviving answer to the question of what a national phone monopoly thinks the internet is for.

Telefónica opened it on 4 September 1995. It was not the internet and was never quite sold as the internet. It was a second TCP/IP network running over the ordinary Spanish phone system, with a browser Telefónica had adapted out of Mosaic and a directory of companies that had signed a commercial agreement to be in it. You dialed 055 from anywhere in the country and that directory is what answered.

The internet was reachable through InfoVía, in the sense that a service provider could sit inside the walled part and pass you out the other side. Teleline and Arsys sold access on exactly that basis. But the shape of the arrangement never changed. Telefónica owned the line and the gate both, and decided from that position what a Spanish web address was worth.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what 055 actually cost ~

The number was the product. 055 was reachable from every province at the same rate, which in 1995 was genuinely useful, because the alternative was a long-distance call to whichever city your provider happened to sit in. Spain is large and its phone tariffs were built around that fact.

What it cost was 139 pesetas an hour during the day and 109 at night, on top of whatever the provider charged for the account itself. The meter ran on connection time rather than on anything you did with the connection. Every minute spent waiting for an image to come down a 28.8 line was a minute Telefónica billed for, which is a business model that pays the operator for being slow.

~ how it ended ~

It ended by order. On 12 March 1998 the Spanish telecoms regulator moved to open the sector, and InfoVía as a compulsory gateway did not survive the decision. By that same March the service had somewhere over 185,000 users, which for a country of forty million with a three-year head start is not a triumph.

The network stopped carrying traffic on 1 December 1998. InfoVía Plus came in behind it from January 1999 with 56k, more than a hundred and forty nodes around the country and none of the exclusive-gateway logic. The name survived. The monopoly it had been built to express did not.

~ what remains ~

Every European PTT tried some version of this and most of them failed in the same direction. France had Minitel and could at least point at millions of terminals it had given away for nothing. Spain arrived late enough that the open web already existed and still put a turnstile in front of it, which is why InfoVía lasted three years where Minitel lasted thirty.

The part worth keeping is the pricing. A gateway that charges by the minute cannot host anything that wants people to stay. InfoVía Plus is apparently still standing in some reduced provincial form, decades after the original was ordered open, which is the usual fate of this kind of infrastructure. The politics dies and the wiring keeps going.

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