Cav's Place

Since I mentioned my ISP issues and the fact that I want to stay with a LAN instead of being switched over to a major “proper” ISP, I thought this would be a good opportunity to explain how this actually works here in Romania, starting from the beginning. Don’t treat this as an exhaustive or particularly detailed post, because it’ll largely come from personal experience and what few other bits of information I remember having gathered along the way, but I hope it’ll paint a reasonably accurate picture of the situation, both past and present.

Back in the ’90s, when Internet access first became available in Romania, Romtelecom had a monopoly on the fixed telephony services, so everything had to go through them. At first, being on-line was more or less reserved for some IT companies and a very small number of individuals, but the situation slowly changed after various ISPs started popping up and offering dial-up access and Romtelecom decided to charge only a tenth of the normal rate for using the phone line for Internet access during the night and on weekends.
Still, even at these greatly reduced rates, such access remained expensive and, due to sharing the phone line, also problematic, and so the first LANs were born. They could be created by individuals or start from companies which would then allow people to connect to their network, and typically involved a rented 56 kbps line, to ensure a permanent connection, which was then shared by all the users. That’s how I first got on-line, connecting to a firm’s network, which had some 40 computers sharing such a 56 kbps line which, as was the norm at the time, actually offered an average of 44 kbps.

Shortly after that, the demand for greater speeds and reliability prompted Romtelecom to start offering ISDN lines, with different channels for phone and Internet, so subscribers could have one 64 kbps line that didn’t interfere with the phone and a second one that was shared between the two services, for a maximum of 128 kbps when the phone was not otherwise used, though using both channels at the same time meant paying twice the rate. However, this service didn’t prove particularly popular and may in fact be largely seen as the agony of dial-up access in Romania, because soon afterwards enterprising people started offering broadband access through the first LANs that were actually meant to function as small, local ISPs.
In small or even medium-sized towns and cities, this may or may not have happened, depending on whether sufficiently enterprising people could be found at the right time for such an initiative. In some such places, such LANs were founded early enough and one or two of them ended up covering almost the entire area, while in others they weren’t and the only broadband options were those that started being offered by the large ISPs which were usually also cable TV operators. However, in larger cities, LANs that contracted broadband access from a major ISP and shared it among all users, splitting the costs, quickly became the norm and said major ISPs found very little room left for them on the residential customers market.

Personally, after that initial arrangement was no longer an option, I had to stay on dial-up for a couple of years, before moving in with Andra and ending up back in such a network. The first one was very small, with a total of four users and no plans to expand, because it was never meant as a commercial project. We had either 32 kbps or 64 kbps, can’t quite remember, out of a 256 kbps line, half of which was reserved for one person who also had the possibility to disconnect the others when he needed all the bandwidth. Right now it’d sound like a very bad deal, but at the time it meant that we could be connected almost permanently while paying an entirely reasonable monthly fee.
But other LANs, those that were actually commercial projects, like the one we eventually switched over to, while also starting with perhaps a similarly small number of users who lived in the same building, quickly expanded, creating a network of cables that stretched all over cities, dozens of them stretching in parallel on poles, between buildings or across facades. It was very bottom-up, with little planning but a lot of passion. The services could vary greatly, the quality of the infrastructure was anyone’s guess, but the competition was fierce, which had both positive and negative aspects, the latter taking the form of frequent sabotage, such as cutting cables or stealing or destroying rivals’ equipment.
Somehow, however, the good far outweighed the bad and thanks to these efforts Romania ended up having the fastest broadband speeds in Europe and being between second and fourth in the overall classification, the low prices stunned anyone living in more developed countries, and metered traffic was unheard of in these LANs and eventually, after initially being the norm in their offers, even the large ISPs were forced to abandon it. In addition, these networks created an entire “ecosystem” for the users, with peering agreements that offered stunning transfer speeds between the member networks, games servers, DC hubs, and in some cases, for a few years, even messaging services and, until enforced anti-piracy legislation put an end to that, public storage servers. And they did all of this while largely preserving the feel of a grassroots effort, offering more freedom, independence and a more direct relationship between the users and the management, which often allowed for more flexible agreements instead of clear and fixed contracts.

The problem was that all those cables offered an excuse, because there were an increasing number of complaints about them and the authorities could start operations supposedly meant to build a more robust Internet infrastructure that’ll also stop being an eyesore. Of course, the real motivation had to do with creating a single infrastructure, which could be monitored and controlled and which would earn money for the major players by requiring the LANs to use it and charging an arm and a leg for this. Under these circumstances, LANs trying to stay in business have to pay these major players absurd fees, and those that can’t do so anymore end up selling their infrastructure and their users, almost always to RDS, which has spent the better part of the past decade aggressively taking over as much of the market as they possibly could.
Obviously, being by far the largest city, Bucharest also has the most notable such project, named NetCity. The plan was advertised as an underground optical fiber infrastructure that all LANs could use, removing the unsightly cables while also improving reliability, greatly reducing the risk of damage, be it accidental or not, and allowing any network to reach clients anywhere in the city instead of being limited to the area they could stretch their own infrastructure to cover. However, the result was an underground optical fiber infrastructure partly built with public funds but controlled by a private company, which has the right to create its own network that’d obviously use this infrastructure free of charge, but which demands exorbitant fees from the LANs that are now required by law to use their services, network administrators saying that their costs as much as tripled as a result. In addition, the authorities demand that people take down all cables no more than a few days after the area they live in becomes accessible through NetCity, which also leads to situations such as no network being able to access a certain area anymore because it’s not covered by NetCity in itself but all the surrounding ones are, so there’s no way to get a cable to it.

Of course, as I said above, RDS is taking full advantage of this, and this started several years ago, with their purchase of C-Zone. This was well before NetCity, nobody saw it coming and it was made far worse by the fact that C-Zone was humongous by the standards of such networks, dwarfing the others by orders of magnitude. And yet one day their customers simply found that they had become RDS customers, being forced to choose a new subscription from their offer, and the entire C-Zone infrastructure, such as their extremely popular DC hub or games servers, was gone.
And this has been the rule ever since. Romtelecom has its own infrastructure, which it has upgraded over time, and largely stays out of this conflict, UPC generally doesn’t get involved in the areas where RDS has a clear presence, even openly stating that they’re afraid to do so, but RDS has no qualms in entering areas traditionally held by UPC according to the old agreement made between Astral and RCS, well before being purchased by UPC and merging with RDS, respectively. They’ll put in their cables in every building, have people knock on every door and shove contracts under people’s noses, pester them to switch over to them, for both TV and Internet, and when that fails they make extremely attractive offers for the LANs that cover the respective area. Worse, there’s never any warning until people realize that their IPs have changed and all of the network’s servers, whether they were used for multiplayer games, DC hubs or even e-mail, have been shut down, which always happens as soon as RDS takes over. As for complaints, their standard reply is that anyone who’s unhappy with their services is free to switch over to someone else… If they can still find someone else, I’d add!

So, between the authorities, projects like NetCity and RDS, the future looks bleak for these networks, and for Internet access here as a whole. We lost that leading position in speed, the independence is going down the drain, that entire “ecosystem” has been largely torn to shreds, and networks seem to be falling into RDS’ gaping maw one after the other. For example, before getting TitanNet, they had purchased iLink, which was the other large network covering this area, back in September, so it was a clear assault on this part of the city… And now the RDS employee who posted on a forum to practically gloat about it said that they just purchased three others, but the names won’t be made public until January, probably because some people managed to get away by finding other options and switching over now, as a few small networks operating in the area have stubbornly refused their offers, so they must be trying to make sure that they leave no stone unturned next time so nobody’ll be able to evade their grasp… Sickening!

Personally, I have been lucky enough to find one such network and switch to them, so I have been a forced RDS customer for less than two days. How much longer will they last, I don’t know, but at the moment they seem determined, and so do a few others I have exchanged some messages with these days. Most seem to have already accepted defeat, even if they’re still operational at the moment, but a few try to fight on, with the help of their customers as well. Unfortunately, many seem unwilling to create a united front, allying and organizing themselves in order to become a stronger opponent, and therefore they remain a bunch of small fish trying to hide or run from the big predator for a little while longer.
And that’s sad… They, in one form or another, have managed to create this infrastructure, this “ecosystem”, these services that were the envy of nearly every country in the world. The authorities had nothing to do with it, the companies such as the one behind NetCity had nothing to do with it, RDS had nothing to do with it… Yet now this “triumvirate” is rapidly destroying everything that these networks have created over the past 15 or so years, and most have either already accepted defeat or seem to think that they’ll make it on their own, hoping that they’ll be left alone and allowed to survive if they just withdraw back into their shell, stick to their small area and keep quiet. And unfortunately, by the time they’ll realize that this approach is wrong, that we need to form a united front and fight back, without letting anyone stand alone, it may well be too late for all of us.