TURNET

~ the obit ~

When I first got a modem onto a phone line in 1998, the handshake ended in some provider's rack and the packets went straight onto TURNET, because in Turkey there was nowhere else for them to go. Whatever name was printed on the dial-up account, the route out of the country was the same route for everybody. TURNET was the national backbone, and for about three years it was the only commercial one.

Türk Telekom announced it in August 1995 and asked for tender proposals that September. The opening was promised for November 1995 and then kept moving, and the network finally went live in August 1996, built by a consortium that included the people who had put in the first link between Middle East Technical University and the United States. That earlier academic connection is the one Turkey celebrates as the arrival of the internet. TURNET is the less romantic sequel where the thing was turned into a product.

The capacity numbers are the part that stays with you. International traffic left the country on three lines: two from Istanbul at 2 Mbit/s and 512 kbit/s, and one from Ankara at 2 Mbit/s. Domestically the backbone was a 2 Mbit/s triangle running Istanbul to Ankara and on to Izmir. Around eighty internet service providers bought access to this and resold it onward to companies and households at whatever price they chose. Every commercial dial-up session in the country was sharing about four and a half megabits of transit.

Reviews at the time were polite and unconvinced. Turkish internet reports of the period call the infrastructure a positive step and immediately note that the entire country's best available speed was well under what an ordinary university in an internet-literate nation already had on its campus. In 1999 Türk Telekom stood up a new backbone under the name TTnet, a 34 Mbit triangle between three cities with roughly a gigabit going abroad, and the TURNET era was over as a matter of engineering rather than of ceremony.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the tender that kept slipping ~

A national backbone is a procurement problem before it is a technical one. The tender was called in September 1995, the launch was set for that November, and the thing opened nine months late. Nobody involved was working from a shortage of demand: the universities had been online since 1993 and every business in Istanbul with a fax machine had heard of email by then.

The delay matters because of what the world did in those months. Between late 1995 and August 1996, the web went from a curiosity to the reason people bought computers. Turkey entered that window with its commercial internet still in a procurement file.

~ eighty resellers on one pipe ~

The market TURNET created was a strange shape. The backbone was a monopoly and the retail layer was a free-for-all, so around eighty providers competed hard on price and support while sharing one set of international lines that none of them could improve. If the evening felt slow, every provider in the country felt slow at the same moment, and switching your account to a rival bought you a different invoice and an identical route.

That structure is the reason Turkish dial-up in the late nineties is remembered as a single shared experience rather than as a set of competing services. The competition was real and it was happening entirely downstream of the bottleneck.

~ the handover ~

There is no switch-off day to record here. Backbones do not get farewell pages, and no source names a date on which TURNET stopped carrying traffic. Türk Telekom announced TTnet at the end of 1997, built it out, and by 1999 the national infrastructure was described as TTnet rather than TURNET in every account written since.

The name did survive one more step than the network did. TTNET became the brand on most Turkish internet bills for a decade after that, and it was itself retired on 26 January 2016 when Türk Telekom folded everything under the parent name.

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