Transpac

~ the obit ~

Turkey got one of these in 1989 and called it TURPAK, and it was sold to banks and ministries, never to a house. That is the whole distance between me and Transpac in one sentence. France built the same kind of network eleven years earlier and then did the thing nobody else did, which was to put it in front of ordinary people and let them dial it from the living room.

The network opened in December 1978 with fifteen hundred direct connections available, operated by a company called Transpac under the French PTT. It ran X.25, the packet standard the CCITT had finished in 1976, much of the drafting work for which had come out of France in the first place. Growth was steady rather than dramatic. It had five thousand three hundred connections by 1981 and double that by 1983. Two years after that there were thirty-one thousand.

Then Minitel arrived and the shape of the thing changed completely. The state gave terminals away free to telephone subscribers, starting with the electronic phone book, and household traffic went up so fast that in June 1985 the operator had to separate consumer usage from business data to stop one from drowning the other. By 1987 Transpac was the largest public packet network anywhere, on revenues approaching four hundred million dollars.

By 1990 the Minitel services were producing forty-five percent of the traffic and about a fifth of six hundred and seventy-eight million dollars of revenue. It carried the mundane national business of France for a decade. Train bookings, bank balances, the phone book, and the paid chat services that funded a surprising amount of it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what made it different ~

Every national phone monopoly with ambition built an X.25 network in that period, and almost all of them sold it as a business product with an account manager attached. Transpac was the one that also became a consumer utility, because France Telecom put the terminal in the house first and worried about the application later. A household dialing 3615 and a bank branch reaching a mainframe were on the same wires.

The billing model is the part worth remembering. You were charged for what you moved and how long you stayed, not for a flat monthly line, and the service you dialed took a share of it. That is why the network made so much money and also why it could never become the internet. A protocol that charges by the packet cannot host anything that wants to be free, and everything that mattered after 1995 wanted to be free.

~ the long decline ~

The web took the traffic starting around 1997 and never gave any of it back. Minitel kept a residual base of people who had the terminal already and services that had never bothered to move, mostly booking systems and a few administrations. France Telecom announced the shutdown years in advance, which is more warning than almost anything on this site received.

On 30 June 2012 Minitel was retired and Transpac went with it, because there was no longer anything to carry. Orange stopped selling Transpac service that same year. The last X.25 switch on the network was not actually powered down until May 2017, kept alive by a handful of institutional customers who had built something in 1988 and never touched it again.

~ what got buried with it ~

The French experiment is usually told as a cautionary story about a country that got there first and then could not let go. That reading is too easy. Transpac gave millions of households a working online service for twenty years before the rest of Europe had one, and it did it with a business model that paid for itself from day one, which no consumer internet company has ever managed without advertising.

What it could not do was open. The network decided which services existed and took a cut of every one of them, and it was very good at both. i came online in 1998 into a system that asked nobody's permission before publishing anything, and that is the only reason there was ever anything on it for me to find.

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