> Part of that was that a lot of the walled-garden services used existing commercial timesharing networks for access, and those were priced for people whose business was paying for it.
Cable television deployments were completely unidirectional. A cable headend typically pulled in a satellite feed and injected that into their coax. There was no upstream connection at the client side and more importantly no upstream at the headend. Cable companies didn't need so didn't have upstream links so they weren't just lying around waiting for some service to use them.
So a counterfactual NABU online service would have needed cable headends upgraded with 1) bidirectional transceivers and 2) the headend offices would need long distance backhaul. Early online services were expensive in part because that backhaul was expensive. A counterfactual NABU service would have needed that same expensive backhaul.
Cable television deployments were completely unidirectional. A cable headend typically pulled in a satellite feed and injected that into their coax. There was no upstream connection at the client side and more importantly no upstream at the headend. Cable companies didn't need so didn't have upstream links so they weren't just lying around waiting for some service to use them.
So a counterfactual NABU online service would have needed cable headends upgraded with 1) bidirectional transceivers and 2) the headend offices would need long distance backhaul. Early online services were expensive in part because that backhaul was expensive. A counterfactual NABU service would have needed that same expensive backhaul.