News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain. Parent comment

Re:Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain by toast0 on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @01:03PM (#48124568)
I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for [email protected] to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.

[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain by ssl-3 on Wednesday May 13, 2026 @01:36PM (#48124965)
Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.

It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.

[ Parent | on HN ]